Rating: 
Summary: Great Book!
Review: This is 'the' book if you want to get your OO and Java concepts right from the word GO!
Rating: 
Summary: The one you should buy
Review: Stop! The search is over!If you want to learn Java, then this book is for you. It is simple enough that even a child could learn it! (About the other reviwers: if they gave this book a bad rating, then probably they didn't read a lot of it, like that guy that only speaks about the 75 page introduction).
Rating: 
Summary: not very good
Review: very long winded and padded with unneccessary discussion, such as a 75 page introductory chapter.
Rating:
Summary: No surprises
Review: Here is an author and publisher who are confident about the quality of their product. The entire book is available for download at the author's web site. You can read a chapter or two (or three or all) and decide if the book is really for you.
Rating:
Summary: Long and bloated treatise
Review: I was forced to buy this book for a college course I'm taking on Java. The book is long winded in the extreme at more than 1,000 pages (not a good thing). The writing style is chatty to the point of sounding like the entire thing was done by dictation. Lots of unhelpful comparisons are provided along the way to Smalltalk, C++, and even FORTRAN. Lots of long dull example programs aren't even worth skimming. A typical example shows every possible combination of scalar type promotion. Not dull enough? Well how about the one which exercises every single operator on every single scalar type. You get the idea The sad part is that I have personally attended Bruce Eckels one and two-day workshops at Software Development Conference and found him to be a concise and coherent speaker in real life.
Rating:
Summary: Bruce Eckel is my Java God
Review: He really is. This book is by far the best book on Java and object oriented programming available. I can't wait for the second edition to become available!
Rating: 
Summary: I should've listened to the bad reviews for this book...
Review: Before I bought this book I read many of the reviews. Many were bad, Many were good. I decided it's worth the risk. It's not really a bad book, but definetly not a good one, either. It's very difficult to read, the examples are the worst possible, perhaps, to illustrate the ideas presented. After reading almost half the book I gave up, and I'm going to buy another book.
Rating:
Summary: good, but...
Review: Be careful about using the source code for this book. Mr. Eckel honestly warns readers (p. 17) that he "makes no representation about the suitability of this software for any purpose" and shall not be made liable for all kinds of damages, even if he has "been advised of the possibility of such damages." In other words, the code is not guaranteed to work. (Of course, this is habitual legal staff, but...)
Rating:
Summary: Almost perfect
Review: This is the best Java book I've seen. It is aimed at programmers who know C and maybe some C++, have played around with Java before, and want to learn Java as a language and not as a set of libraries and hacks. It does not really cover all the capabilities of Java in gory detail (Swing, security, RMI, etc.) It is designed to teach you to be a competent Java programmer.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent and comprehensive Java introduction
Review: It has taken me several months to get through this tome, but I have definitely been exposed to all topics I hear other Java developers speak of at my company. This book has provided a great foundation of Java concepts, organization, functionality, etc. that I can now build on with other more specialized texts.
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