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Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Author: Pat Niemeyer
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: 2005-05-20
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Label: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Number Of Pages: 976 Features:
Editorial Review:
Version 5.0 of the Java 2 Standard Edition SDK is the most important upgrade since Java first appeared a decade ago. With Java 5.0, you'll not only find substantial changes in the platform, but to the language itself-something that developers of Java took five years to complete. The main goal of Java 5.0 is to make it easier for you to develop safe, powerful code, but none of these improvements makes Java any easier to learn, even if you've programmed with Java for years. And that means our bestselling hands-on tutorial takes on even greater significance.
Learning Java is the most widely sought introduction to the programming language that's changed the way we think about computing. Our updated third edition takes an objective, no-nonsense approach to the new features in Java 5.0, some of which are drastically different from the way things were done in any previous versions. The most essential change is the addition of "generics", a feature that allows developers to write, test, and deploy code once, and then reuse the code again and again for different data types. The beauty of generics is that more problems will be caught during development, and Learning Java will show you exactly how it's done.
Java 5.0 also adds more than 1,000 new classes to the Java library. That means 1,000 new things you can do without having to program it in yourself. That's a huge change. With our book's practical examples, you'll come up to speed quickly on this and other new features such as loops and threads. The new edition also includes an introduction to Eclipse, the open source IDE that is growing in popularity.
Learning Java, 3rd Edition addresses all of the important uses of Java, such as web applications, servlets, and XML that are increasingly driving enterprise applications. The accompanying CD includes the Java 5.0 SDK for Windows, Linux, and Solaris, plus the Eclipse IDE, the NetBeans IDE, and the many example programs from the book. Cached date: AWS Called=true You may also be interested in these products:
A great book with a misleading title 2008-05-02 I've been programming in Java for the last year and half, and Learning Java is the book I've been turning to most after picking up the rudiments from other sources. This 900+ page book is great for a reference on almost any Java topic. It is well written, and the authors generally do a very good job cutting through to the important aspects of each topic.
Learning Java is NOT, as other reviewers here have pointed out, a good choice for a first book on Java (unless, perhaps, one is already an experienced object-oriented programmer). This is not to say it's overly technical - just that there are better books for the purpose of learning Java as something new. For beginners I'd recommend Head First Java as the best single book.
As a deskside reference for Java topics, I find Learning Java more useful than Java in a Nutshell (Flanagan), Thinking In Java (Eckel), or Just Java (van der Linden). These other books each have their own strengths, but Learning Java has been a most worthwhile addition to my group of core Java books. I suspect that Learning Java would have a much wider following if only it had a different title.
Disappointing for an O'Reilly book 2008-01-04 One expects a certain amount of intellectual gravity and reliability with the O'Reilly "animal series" books on technical subjects. I bought the book based solely on the fact that I needed an intro book on Java, and have never been disappointed with an O'Reilly book. Well, now I have been disappointed.
The book starts very well. The first two chapters take you through an engaging tutorial -- taking one idea in Java at a time, and slowly building up. However, after those first two chapters, the tutorial goes away and the book gets very dry. The organization of the content is not well thought-out for a beginner's book. Just for a couple of fairly trivial examples, the authors spend a few pages on the "assert" keyword before they explain arrays (a very fundamental concept). As a comparison, "Head First Java" (highly recommended, by the way) doesn't mention "assert" until an appendix, and only as one of the "Top Ten Things That Didn't Make it into The Book" list. Also, there is a wasted page on optimization and performance in chapter 6, which is about Subclassing and Inheritance. It would have been better for them to focus on getting code running, and doing what it's supposed to do, and leave optimization for an Appendix.
Good points of the book include a lot of detailed explanation on some of the Java API, including Swing and JavaBeans, as well as explanations on how to use the two most popular IDEs: NetBeans and Eclipse. RMI and the natural relationship between Java and the web are covered well. And the 3rd edition of the book has been expanded to cover topics new in Java 5.
The accompanying CD contains Eclipse, Tomcat, NetBeans, Ant, and other utilities -- all of which (except for scripting language written by one of the authors) are readily available from the web. So the CD doesn't really contain anything that you couldn't get by trolling the web for a half-hour and doing a few hundred MB of downloads. (Plus, getting the tools from the web ensures that you get the most up-to-date versions...)
So, this book is another reference work, another way to explain Java, but it's nowhere near the best.
Java Review 2006-11-10 The book is a great addition to my library. While it didn't get all my questions answered, it was very helpful.
Excellent book if you know a few things about programming 2006-05-01 This book covers almost everything (that fits inside one volume) in Java. Very concise and precise, but needs some prior experience in any high level progamming language. Very good examples. This book help me a lot to dive fast in the Java's deep waters.
Ahh a delight for your mind 2006-02-06 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. And most of the time you end up dropping the book. 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
2008-05-02
2008-01-04