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Rating: 
Summary: Would give 0 stars because I don't even like the elephants!
Review: I am currently enrolled in a Java course and because I hadn't programmed in a while, I bought this book in addition to the textbook, as a reinforcement. The textbook was trash, as I expected . . . and as most are, but this book just compounded the problem. I thought I was deficient of the necessary brain cells needed to grasp new concepts after reading Java Gently. It wasn't until I read the comments on this page that I realized it wasn't me, it was the book! I have (rusty) HTML/XHTML and C/C++ experience, so I'm not even a complete novice and still this book made a relatively easing programming language (from what I hear) a lot more confusing. I bought this book used and still feel ripped off.
Bottom line . . .
DO NOT BUY JAVA GENTLY!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Still waiting to be translated
Review: I'm a first year student and this book doesn't help a lot. It gives advice here and there, but I've seen many students walking around with other textbooks as well. The author may be a lecturer at the University of Pretoria, but she doesn't know how to write. As she said herself, The book have been translated into many languages, but is still waiting to be translated into English.
Rating:
Summary: badly written book
Review: This book is bad, and thats it. The author does not teach java but her own java gently class, that has errors. Most of the examples dont work, and for first year students it is a waste of money.Dont buy this book, get a free ebook on java or use the api from sun.
Rating:
Summary: Nice picture of an elephant.
Review: Unfortunately, that is probably about the best thing I can say about this text.
Being a complete novice without any previous programming experience, I expected to find learning Java hard. I cannot express how much more difficult, and at the same time demoralising, the process has been made by this book.
I can understand that difficult decisions must be made when writing an "introductory" text; a large part of the learning process relies on blind-faith, as not all essential concepts may be covered at one time. However, while I do not doubt the authors credentials as a Java programmer, I was continually frustrated by the way she leapt around from one thing to another, with no concept ever being fully explained.
I liked the idea of using example programs to illustrate concepts. But how much of my time was wasted trying to work out why these programs would not compile? - more often than not they contained errors or were missing lines of code!
Furthermore, how can you justify giving sample questions at the end of each chapter which rely on the next two chapters to be read before the student is able to solve them?If you are a due to lecture a Java course, please, for the sake of your students and your own sanity, do not recommend this book.
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