Beginners Guide
Introduction to Programming Using Java : An Object-Oriented Approach (2nd Edition)
Format: Paperback
Author: David Arnow
ReleaseDate: 20 August, 2003
Publisher: Addison Wesley
Rating:
Good Java textbook 
If you are someone who's very new to programming, OOP may be a little over your head -- I don't mean to sound rude, but even for a seasoned programmer like myself (with 15 years of experience in everything from C to Fortran to VB to Perl to Matlab), OOP is always a hard to grasp concept, and I still program in a non-OOP way. This is a good textbook on Java and also OOP (object oriented programming). (That's why I never quite adopted Java. ) In that case, you should start with a C book.
But if you must learn OOP, or Java, this book will serve you well. It tries to be gentile in its treatment of computer programming concepts, and presents plenty of Java code to illustrate the various points. I find the important thing about using this book is, you gotta do the exercises, and don't be lazy. OOP is really a complex concept, so lots of sweat and swears are just part of becoming proficient at it. This book helped me understand Java and OOP better, although I will probably never adopt the OOP paradigm of programming. For me, C and Perl (and VB in Windows) do all the tricks I need.
Feel free to drop me a note at gadgester @t hotmail if you have any questions about learning programming.
Poor Instructor Support 
The biggest problem is that there is no instructor support - PowerPoints, odd/even numbered solution sets, additional examples - that are or will be provided for this textbook. The first four chapters of the book do cover the basics of Java, but the book is a little dry and the examples are often split up and hard to track and place together for students. Thus unless you are an instructor who has numerous extra days free to work on answering book questions and preparing slides I would recommend using another textbook for your class that has this material prepared to help in class planning.
Great, but only for intermediate student 
The situation can be uinderstood by noting that this is NOT a beginning level textbook, despite what the author might have intended. I read some other reviews here, and I saw one person getting rather angry, while another was full of praise. Although the author writes using simple and familiar phrases to try to make things clear, its still the case that what he is doing will not be understood by anyone who is completely new to the whole notion of objects. This book is best as a second or third book, to be read by someone who is already comfortable with what an object is.
I suppose the way to view this book is that it is a needed gap-filler between the books getting readers to understand what an object is, and what it can do, and the advanced books addressed to experienced programmers who are already experts but just need to get the specifics of Java. What the book does is take a student who knows at least a boiler-plate idea of what objects are and work with him to develop a much more intuitive understanding. Having said that, I would say that this book is good at what it does. It presents a useful conceptual picutre of objects, which should be very helpful in designing programs, and in understanding code written by others.
|
