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Java All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies Review by D. Comer
Pretty Good Introduction
I found this book to be a great refresher. That is, having written Java in the past, writing mainly C# in the last 8 years, I needed to update my knowledge of Java since Java 1.2. The authors(s) do a good job of keeping the material from becoming too dry. Many programming books start with too much theory before diving into practical code. This book starts with a quick tutorial on two programming tools, TextPad and Eclipse, and does a good job explaining enough of both tools to get you started. The reason for two tools is that if you are new to a complex IDE environment, the author(s) introduce a text centric tool (TextPad) and a more advanced GUI based tool (Eclipse).
As one reviewer noted, it is best to think of this book as one, larger book (paraphrasing). The author states that the book is not intended to be read cover-to-cover yet I found reading cover-to-cover was better for me. The material starts with the simple, "Hello World" style examples covering editing, compiling, and running code. Simple examples are interspersed with Java requirements for file naming, class structure, running examples, data types, if-then-else, loops, switch, exceptions and other introductory concepts.. Following books/chapters cover object oriented programming, more formal class structure, subclasses, inheritance, interfaces, inner classes, packaging ad documenting classes, String, Array, and collections, thread programming, network programming, regular expressions, recursion Swing (Java's GUI API), We programming files and databases, XML operations, and applications with drawing and animation.
Jammed packed as this book is with nearly all basic concepts a beginning to intermediate Java programmer needs to know, the material is intended to get you started and only scratches the surface of what a professional Java programmer will acquire with time. In my opinion, there is a good balance of material with a decent writing style. I knocked one star off the review, however, because there are some rather obvious blunders in the book. To my knowledge, there are no errata posted for the book, so it may take you about one star's worth of head scratching to get around those blunders. Fortunately, this is the exception (no pun intended) and not the rule.