Just Java™ 2 (Sun Microsystems Press) [ペーパーバック]

"Just Java 2" is a great read and one of my favorite programming books (and I have stacks of them, some good, some bad, many so-so).

However, if you are completely new to programming "Just Java 2" is (probably) not the book for you. Instead, get a beginner level book (or two) on learning Java and programming basics and work your way through them.

Then, when you know the basics, sit down with "Just Java 2" in a bookstore and re-read Peter Van Der Linden's explanations of a few of the subjects that your beginner-level Java programming books tried to teach you ...especially subjects that you "kind of know" but wish you understood better. Chances are that this book's short yet lucid explanations will periodically set off little light bulbs of sudden understanding over your head and bring new clarity to your grasp of the Java language. It did for me.

I think this is a great intermediate level Java text and a clearly understandable introduction to more advanced subjects like the JDBC, Servlets and Java Beans.

As for other Java books, we all have our own learning styles and likes/dislikes but here's some of what I've found in my quest to teach myself Java.

1) I have personally found many of the O'Reilly books (on a range of subjects, not only Java) to be unsatisfyingly terse.

2) Ivor Horton's "Beginning Java 2" provides a lot of detail but in a long-winded, scattershot, myopic, stream-of-consciousness style that make it difficult to separate key kernels of knowledge from what amounts to background noise. In other words, the cloudy writing, apparent lack of coherent editing and poor formatting (e.g many unlabelled tables) tended to confuse me as much as educate me and turned attempts to later go back and locate and quickly reread key topics into long "Where's Waldo"-like wadings through "deep text".

3) Dietel & Dietel's "Java: How To Program" at the outset offers the Java novice clear and explicit line by line explanations of sample Java programs. However, about half way through the book that style really bogs way down in wordy detail and becomes tiresome as topics become more advanced. Still, it's not a bad book for an absolute beginner.

Anyway, that's my two cents.

The best characteristic of this book is that it provides fantastic introductions to a wide range of topics; that is, it has great breadth but is otherwise lacking in depth on each topic. That's fine for me, and probably for most experienced programmers, because typically when learning a new topic, I just want a quick start (including what packages to use, how to get it working, and seeing initial results), and if I need a deeper understanding, I'll look online or buy a more focused book. This is how I've learned almost all my Java. Indeed, I recently bought the 5th edition to start learning about server-side technologies like JSP, servlets, and JDBC. It hasn't disappointed me.

One chapter I found outstanding is the one on I/O. The number of Java I/O classes is huge as all Java programmers know because the I/O library sacrifices ease-of-use for extreme generality. The author's explanation of when to use which classes is incredibly clear and is perhaps the best of any Java book I've read at giving you the big picture of the I/O library.

I really like this author's writing. His explanations are crystal clear. Example: his step-by-step explanation for setting up the Tomcat JSP/Servlet server was excellent (although some key points have been changed by the Tomcat folks since this book was published). This level of clarity probably comes from the fact that the author is a programmer himself, whereas most of the other intro Java books out there (especially those in the Core... series) are written by university professors or professional lecturers who try to keep everything extremely general. Such generality is not always helpful. In earlier books, the author seemed to intermingle his dry humour throughout the book, but thankfully he seems to have placed such humour only in isolated areas, such as the anecdotes at the end of each chapter.