Rating: 
Summary: Good, but not great.
Review: Although this book is certainly thorough (in fact, I find it works better as a reference than as a tutorial), the explanations tend to be too specific to the example codes, which themselves are not very practical. For the most part, you feel as if you are learning Java in a vacuum, with topics frustratingly insulated from one another.In terms of writing, Ivor Horton tends to be very verbose; many times I felt that what took two or three paragraphs to convey could easily have been condensed into one concise (and more accessible!) paragraph. That having been said, this book has proven useful at teaching me the principles of Java programming, although the chapters on File I/O were pretty useless. Look to Bruce Eckel's "Thinking in Java" for that...
Rating: 
Summary: the best java tutorial for greenhorn can be ever found!
Review: as a cs majored student i have read quite a few java tutorial, this one is the best i've found. the author assumes no previous programming experiens, everything step by step; he not only teaches what java is and HOW TO USE IT, but also teaches you good programming style from very beginning. It shows a great consideration to the simplicity as well as performance of your java codes, and explains why you should do this way in a scientific yet very clear and easy to understand manner. i simply love the author's writing style. the book is well structured, mastering an OOP language such as java is never really a piece of cake for most people, but this book does its best to minimize your pain all along the road. you can be sure you are getting knowledge, confidence, skill and fun with this book. and, all the examples given in the book are just complete applications or applets. they are just ready for you to try them out. Our professor put deitel and deitel's " java: how to program " in his literature list, but after using it for a while, i no longer thought it a good idea for a beginner. the examples given in this book seem not to reveal how to program and what is oop but rather to conceal them, besides, it's really not a fancy idea to begin with swing . but in this Ivor's book, he starts with plain console application, so you can concentrate on what you should concentrate as a beginner. then i also tried " thinking in java", i have to admit it is a nice book, but too conceptual, and most codes in this book are not complete, you might have to bother to add some code if you want to try them out. if you were still not familiar with I/O control, it could be a problem for you. and, the knowledge such as memory allocation...etc are not merged in the java teaching as well as Ivor's book. there are also other java books i have read, but i cannot even recall them. and seems i dont need more with this Ivor's great work on java learning. of course one would need other tutorial when go further into some specific field, however, i venture to say this is the best book for a greenhorn so far.
Rating:
Summary: Great Beginner Book
Review: As far as introductory books on programming languages go, I would have to say this book is at the top of my list. It is a good book for people who are new to programming, but packs enough meat at 1100+ pages for people like me who have programmed in other languages and are looking to pick up Java. Horton does a wonderful job explaining basic principles of object oriented design and the right way to document code. This does was it is meant to do, if you have used previous versions of Java, I would recommend picking up Oreilly's Java 1.4 in a Nutshell.
Rating: 
Summary: Poor Content
Review: Do not buy this book. It does not contain practical examples and lacks expanation of concepts.
Rating:
Summary: Yes, a book this big IS for beginners
Review: I am teaching a co-worker's daughter to program in Java and this book is exactly what we needed. She was programming-phobic and Ivor's teaching style calmed her down by explaining things very well. At 1162 pages, it is a big book. That might tend to frighten some beginners, until they realize that the reason why it is so big is because things are explained very well. If there is anything overlooked, we haven't found it yet. For more experienced Java folks, there are the later chapters. He covers things like Java and XML. I learned a few things by just browsing around in the book. The primary, target audience is the beginner. I think they would be very happy that they bought this book.
Rating:
Summary: My favorite Java book!
Review: I bought some other books to learn Java but I no longer needed any other book after buying this one. I found everything I needed in this book and very well explained. Examples are sometimes poorly selected but they are explained well and they get the message across.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book on Java - recommended
Review: I bought this book as an introduction to Java programming. I found that it offered both general Java programming concepts and Java programming code in just the right measure to make learning the Java language easy (or as easy as learning a new language can be). I strongly recommend this book for beginners. The examples are clear, relevant and concise. Each example is followed by an explanation of the preceding code segments to ensure that the reader understands all of the example. Where it is necessary to mention a topic before it's time, the author specifically states that the topic will be covered in detail later in the book (with a reference to the chapter). This works well, as it is easier to defer some material until you have a better understanding of the basics. Since each chapter builds on material learned in previous chapters, I would strongly advise anyone using this book to take the chapters in sequence. It is very tempting to jump to the parts of the book that interests you most, but to do that would make your task of understanding those 'interesting' parts more difficult. While it is impossible for any author to write a book that satisfies everyone, I think that Ivor Horton has done an excellent job for the scope of this book. He has taken a no nonsense approach to teaching the language, and it pays off for those with sufficient motivation to learn. If you are looking for a laugh-a-minute approach to Java programming, complete with fun examples and pictures, then this is not the book for you. It is not the only book you will need, as it does not (cannot) cover all Java-related topics, but it is a very thorough start. I certainly learned a lot from this book, and now keep it close at hand for reference.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Book, not the best for a beginner...
Review: I bought this book because I liked Mr. Horton's style of writing and the fact that the book maintained its consistency because it didn't have 50 writers working on the same book! Now for the bad part. If your looking for a good book to quickly get you up to speed in Java, this won't be it. Mr. Horton seems to give way too much information for a beginner's book (yes this can be a bad thing). He explains a new concept (such as what an inner class is), and then gives you so much detail over so many pages that you've forgotten what the point of the chapter was in the first place. I like nitty gritty details as much as the next programmer, but let me get a firm handle on the basics before beating me over the head with every little nuance and idiosyncracy of every part of the language. This made the chapters seem longer than many of them really were and I didn't feel like I was making much headway (which isn't good for a book with 1000 + pages)! Also, many of the examples seem better suited to pursuing an undergraduate degree in Computer Science than learning Java. For example, when he was explaining what Java Classes are, he used enough math in there that it took me longer to figure what his code did than how to use Java Classes! I would recommend The Java(TM) Tutorial: A Short Course on the Basics from Sun if you want to get up to speed quickly and start programming right away with Java. Then I would fall back on Bruce Eckel's book, Thinking in Java and Ivor's Java 2 to gain a broader and deeper knowledge of the language and how to use it more effectively. So don't get me wrong, this is not a bad book, just not the one I would choose to start learning Java with. This book would have been better titled as "Java 2, The Almost Complete Reference" or "Professional Java Development".
Rating:
Summary: Not for people who know other languages
Review: I completely concur with other reviewers assessment that this book is for folks who are new to programming. For the novice, this book goes into a lot of detail and does a lot of carefull, and (helpfully) repetitious, description. I would definitely recommend this book for the novice. But if you know another language already (especially an object oriented one), you'll go nuts wading through the detail and repetition. Having made this realization, I switched to Bruce Eckel's _Thinking In Java_ (3rd ed.) and am delighted with it. You can easily execute his sample code along with your reading and modify as needed to experiement. His explanations of the language are to the point and clear for people who are already familiar with OO programming. If you are not familiar with OO, it's still good because he does go over the concepts. His approach gets you into Java really quickly and and at a meaningful level of detail.
Rating:
Summary: My favorite Java book
Review: I had the previous edition at work, but I bought this one for myself. It is a monumental work of technical writing. Check out the page count -- I assure you, each page is packed full of knowledge, not just facts. Not only that, but it's not like half the coding books out there that are just useless code listings for page after page -- this book has REAL content on every page. It's also very accessible (I taught myself Java with the book) and extremely well organized. Having written some technical stuff myself, I simply do not know how he does it. I recommend this book for beginners *and* as a reference for the advanced programmer. Though he doesn't really present them as such, there are lots of "design patterns" as he teaches each concept with a real-world, useful way of accomplishing some common problem. I've actually used the examples from the book in my own code many times.
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