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Rating: 
Summary: Not for beginners
Review: As an experienced C programmer I have to say that this book
is a great introduction to Java 2 but it is not for
beginners from my experience. The chapers are written in a
friendly way that makes them easy enough to understand, but
after the first section that covers getting up to speed with
Java in general, Object Oriented Programming concepts, etc
you REALLY have be a programmer to absorb the concepts and
examples.Starting with chapter 6 the authors take off the kid gloves.
This particular section was the most complex part of the
book for me, and I found it easier to skim through this
collection of chapters lightly at first and then revist
these topics later once I got into the other more hands-on
parts of the book (such as input/output, creating graphical
user interfaces, and networking, etc): plan to make two
passes on the "middle" chapters if you want to memorize them
by heart. Because the Java language is covered in such detail I found
this book to be a good desk reference for fundamental
concepts, making it a good book for C programmers like me
who want to learn Java, especially when combined with the
free online API specifications. Overall I give it four out
of five stars. Between the book itself and the free online
support site it was defintely worth the $$ since I bought it
used, but be warned it's not for beginners!
Rating: 
Summary: where are the ejb's??
Review: Coming from a programmer experienced in other languages, I thought the pace and depth of this book were perfect. It helped me pick up java and after reading it cover-to-cover, I'm now coding java apps for a living. It's not going to be the only book on java technologies I ever read, but it makes a great first book on java technology.
Rating: 
Summary: Not For Beginners
Review: I am an experienced programmer, but I found this book difficult. By Page 120, you have been given the Hello World example and by page 323 you have been given the basic syntax. However, alot of the code examples continually use stuff that the reader has not yet been exposed to. Also, no where up to page 323 does the book really explain how you write a basic java class. The chapters cover individual topics, but nothing links the chapters together. The book gives the reader separate building blocks, but little guidance on how to construct a usable program with those blocks. I learned much more at the Sun tutorial site than I did from reading this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Waste of paper and time.
Review: I couldn't recommend this book to anyone. I bought this book on the strength of the publisher, simply because the Javascript Bible is so fantastic. What waste of my money. What really tears at a technical book is it's ability as a reference. In this regard, it is useless, clumsy and horrible. I was trying to learn java coming from ASP & JavaScript experience and this got me nowhere. Trying to code with this at my side just didn't work. If you want to learn java, go straight to the source...Want a reference... learn to use javadoc. This book showed me nothing, and did little to excite myself in Java. It shows that the writers came from another language, and weren't excited about what java was bringing to the table. For example: From the outset, java was an integration of a wealth of experience from it's developers. Built into the language is a documentation tool. JavaDoc. Brilliant to use, and truly an excellent solution. This book did tell you to have documentation, but all their code is blocks of single line comments! They do mention JavaDoc... but why not use it yourself!?? Never got anything from this book. Threw the book out last week. Can't believe a contryman below gave it a good wrap. sad.
Rating:
Summary: Yikes is right!
Review: I don't really know what to make of this book. It started out great. I devoured the first 5 chapters (~170 pages) in a weekend. Then, inexplicably, the authors depart from their tutoring role and go into lecture mode. After the obligatory HelloWorld example and a few sample applications and applets in the first part of the book, we are subjected to reading the next 200 pages before another interactive exercise appears. It's a shame, too, because I really like the authors' writing style. They definitely kept me interested but I just felt that I wasn't learning anything with the meager offering of hands-on exercises. I'll give the book 2 stars for the excellent Part I of the book. The rest is all down hill. What a letdown.
Rating:
Summary: if (java2bible == java2babble) { doNotBuy(); }
Review: I get annoyed with these "kitchen sink" books that purport to cover everything and in reality *teach* us very little. I never need just *one* book for everything. I'd also like to highlight the fact that J2EE includes RMI (incl. Activation fwk), Corba (IDL, etc..), JNDI, EJB, Servlets (perhaps JSP). These topics are conspicuous by their absence so avoid this for J2EE and get: Java Enterprise in a Nutshell.
I pity any java-junior trying to balance this weighty tome on their knees: it's sheer size is unworkable. The book is a cancerous polyp on the butt of an over published tech-book-market.
Rating:
Summary: Not for beginners.. not for experts either.
Review: I get annoyed with these "kitchen sink" books that purport to cover everything and in reality *teach* us very little. I never need just *one* book for everything. I'd also like to highlight the fact that J2EE includes RMI (incl. Activation fwk), Corba (IDL, etc..), JNDI, EJB, Servlets (perhaps JSP). These topics are conspicuous by their absence so avoid this for J2EE and get: Java Enterprise in a Nutshell.
I pity any java-junior trying to balance this weighty tome on their knees: it's sheer size is unworkable. The book is a cancerous polyp on the butt of an over published tech-book-market.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent 1st Java book for me
Review: I'm glad that I got this book as my first Java programming book. It was just what I needed to get up and going with Java development. The writing style is approachable and interesting, not just some technical manual for hard-core programmers, which helped me to make sense of the subject matter. I especially liked the introduction to object oriented programming, since I didn't have any exposure to OOP before. I found the "nuts and bolts" section of the book to be a good reference, but it didn't have the same amount of example code and programs that the other sections had (I'd recommend that the authors consider adding more examples and code to that section in the future since that would help with this part a lot). I also found that there was a lot of Java covered that I didn't need. I will probably never use Java and databases, for instance, so that chapter wasn't of any use to me although it's good to know that it's there if I ever do need it down the road. I also found the free online version of the original Java Bible very valuable since I wanted to learn how to program Java applets that all browsers could run, so having that plus the printed version of the Java 2 Bible was like getting two books for the price of one. Overall I found this to be an excellent first book for me, and would recommend it to others just getting started with Java and Java 2.
Rating:
Summary: Not for beginners.. not for experts either.
Review: This book assumes you know the subject already. The problem is that the book explains things as if the reader is already a Java programmer. How can one read & understand a company's 10Q filing if he didn't know what PE ratio meant? Then it leaves out too many details to be useful to anyone.
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