Java In A Nutshell, 5th Edition

Head First Java, 2nd Edition

Beginners Guide

Learning Java

Format: Paperback
Author: Patrick Niemeyer
ReleaseDate: 20 May, 2005
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Rating:

Excellent book if you know a few things about programming
Very concise and precise, but needs some prior experience in any high level progamming language. This book covers almost everything (that fits inside one volume) in Java. Very good examples. This book help me a lot to dive fast in the Java's deep waters.

Ahh a delight for your mind
And most of the time you end up dropping the book. I have been working in this industry for past five years, I have been addicted to buying books on programming, The trouble with most of the books is that they don't focus on people who are programmers, They just re-hash for-loop while-loop its really irritating to read such topics in say 1 hour that you can squeeze out of your time.
This book is definitely different

Doesn't focus on teaching programming like a text for university course?
The style of narrative is super and free-flowing. It is easy to read say 100 pages per day
The examples are quite stylish and don't have the dummies approach.
The authors have depth knowledge abt what they are talking

In all a good book if your bit experienced in java/C++ or even C
(Newcomers should start with books like head-first java or C++ by lafore before taking up this material)

There is one definite short coming this books some times doesn't covers very complicated topics; and definitively you can't hope to use it as an reference.

Hope the authors write a book on advance java topics that can be read after finishing this book
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Good survey style introduction to Java technologies
While most of the sections does not go into enough detail to fully cover the area (and that would be impossible without making the book a multi volume effort) they provide enough detail to form the basis of further research. Learning Java provides a good introduction to the Java technologies that make up J2SE.

The section on Java the language provides enough detail to get you up and running if you already know another object oriented language such as C++ or C# but it will not be sufficient for complete beginners.

But in terms of what it tries to cover as a set of overviews, it succeeds well.