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Rating: 
Summary: This book will make you hate java
Review: As Java is my sixth programming language I have a fair bit of experience with these type of books, and all I can say is that this is the worst I have ever come across. It has no sense of progression and it does not seem to have the idea of learning in mind at all - ie progressing from simple to more complex... It seems to be written for people who already know Java entirely and are wanting some kind of refresher, but its not very good as a reference either, so I actually don't know who would find this book useful....whats particularly annoying is that its not actually an advanced book, but the authors manage to make simple concepts as obscure and complicated as possible, so you struggle for ages trying to understand, and once it finally clicks, you feel almost cheated. The writing is very repetitive too - by chapter 15 why are they still telling you that "the structure of the package mirrors the file system, so you can find the code for this example in ...."before EVERY single code example? It sounds like a stupid complaint, but I swear that sentence alone is responsible for about 5 pages of this book. If you are forced to buy this book by your uni or college as I was, my advice is that you read it cover to cover several times, and don't be too concerned with understanding it the first or second time... you need the later chapters to understand the earlier chapters properly. I think the best way to read it is to start with the chapter end summary, then try and figure out the code example and discussion, and only after that confuse yourself with the actual chapter. It is not comprehensive and you are likely to spend a lot of time on the net (your cash would be better spent printing out Suns java tutorial) and using other books instead. It is also horribly biased to IBM VisualAge for Java, as Wigglesworth was one of the developers, and the first bit of advice given to me by senior students at my uni was to rather use anything else, even javac, than that peice of... To be fair, the questions are quite good and challenging, but as others have said, its kinda pointless without access to the answers. The unfortunate effect of all this is that you end up frustrated with Java itself rather than just this badly put together book.
Rating:
Summary: This book will make you hate java
Review: As Java is my sixth programming language I have a fair bit of experience with these type of books, and all I can say is that this is the worst I have ever come across. It has no sense of progression and it does not seem to have the idea of learning in mind at all - ie progressing from simple to more complex... It seems to be written for people who already know Java entirely and are wanting some kind of refresher, but its not very good as a reference either, so I actually don't know who would find this book useful....whats particularly annoying is that its not actually an advanced book, but the authors manage to make simple concepts as obscure and complicated as possible, so you struggle for ages trying to understand, and once it finally clicks, you feel almost cheated. The writing is very repetitive too - by chapter 15 why are they still telling you that "the structure of the package mirrors the file system, so you can find the code for this example in ...."before EVERY single code example? It sounds like a stupid complaint, but I swear that sentence alone is responsible for about 5 pages of this book. If you are forced to buy this book by your uni or college as I was, my advice is that you read it cover to cover several times, and don't be too concerned with understanding it the first or second time... you need the later chapters to understand the earlier chapters properly. I think the best way to read it is to start with the chapter end summary, then try and figure out the code example and discussion, and only after that confuse yourself with the actual chapter. It is not comprehensive and you are likely to spend a lot of time on the net (your cash would be better spent printing out Suns java tutorial) and using other books instead. It is also horribly biased to IBM VisualAge for Java, as Wigglesworth was one of the developers, and the first bit of advice given to me by senior students at my uni was to rather use anything else, even javac, than that peice of... To be fair, the questions are quite good and challenging, but as others have said, its kinda pointless without access to the answers. The unfortunate effect of all this is that you end up frustrated with Java itself rather than just this badly put together book.
Rating: 
Summary: Very good explanations of fundamental concepts
Review: However, not really advanced material. If you are taking the Java 2 certification exam this book is extremely helpful especially if you are a beginner. But be aware that if you are an individual ordering this book you will not receive any answers to the end of chapter questions. The book is directed toward Instructors and classroom training. Therefore the answers to review questions are not available to anyone who is not an instructor registered with the publisher. You need a password to get the answers to the questions. It will cost you another $20.00 to get some of the answers as you have to sign a release with the publisher.
Rating: 
Summary: Confusing Book, Poorly Written
Review: This is the kind of book that gives you a ton of useless classes to install on your system, along with about 50 pages of how to install the ... on your computer. If you don't watch it or read the fine print, one of the IDE's that the accompanying cd installs, will go and screw up your classpath during its install. The simple installing procedure to install some jar files is so complicated that you will spend a half a day getting it installed. And once it is installed the docs, make it impossible to generate the docs you need to use the stuff. From the beginning of the book, there is no smooth transition about how to use java, it just jumps all over the place. The examples you are suposed to do in chapter 2, ask you to do IO things which aren't even covered until chapter 8....? Why do people do that? The writer of the book did not take the end-user into account, but just wrote to get the job done. It is a terrible book.
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