Java In A Nutshell, 5th Edition

Head First Java, 2nd Edition

Reference

Java All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies

Format: Paperback
Author: Doug Lowe
ReleaseDate: 29 April, 2005
Publisher: For Dummies
Rating:

A friendly reference
The explanation is always plain simple yet to the point. I love to dip into this book to ease into whatever java topic that I need to know. A truly friendly java reference for beginner level programmers.

Good reference & tutorial, but not for the faint-of-heart!
However, I would not consider this a step-by-step intorductory tutorial on Java - more like a "Firehose approach to everything you need to know to be a good Software Engineer, using Java". This book does a good job at introducing several topics, from basic Java programming to respectable OOP practices.

My 10 year old son has no programming experience at all, and was able to follow the beginning chapters fairly easily, once we got Java installed. However, diving into the Eclipse framework in chapter 4 and discussing "refactorings" before OOP lost him in a hurry.

The amount of sample code is extensive, and is well used throughout the book to substantiate the topics and ideas. This is truly a reference book that supplies many excellent examples of how to do it "right".

This is a great reference book for the junior programmer, and I would reccomend it to college students up to the 2nd year programmer.

just treat it as a big Dummies text
Inside, Lowe follows through on this claim by having groups of chapters, where each group is a "book". Don't take too seriously the cover's claim about this book being 9 books wrapped into one. If you take that at face value, each book is only some 100 pages or less.

My suggestion is to ignore the 9 books hype. Just regard this as an atypically long Dummies text. You get a decent exposition of the basics of Java. If the book seems long, it is because Java has grown.

The book also correctly gives minimal space to explaining how to write applets. This was the original Java niche. But applets have proven to be disappointing for much serious work. It's nice to see that Lowe has done his homework on this.