Beginning Java

Rating:
Summary: Not for beginners, but pretty good.
Review: Used it as a college textbook in a beginners Java course. The title is deceiving. It is not for beginners. It was way over our heads. Everyone in the course hated it for the first month or 2.. I would suggest to the author to stick with one metaphor in explaining how the Java language works (he jumps from fruit to baseball etc.).
I am now singing a different tune. It is a pretty comprehensive book and easy to understand. I looked through many Java books in the local book superstore and found none better then this book, actually very few that even come near (and they must have over 100 Java titles.

Rating:
Summary: Hard to follow, very wordy.
Review: I have read several books on Java, this one seemed to me to be the most confusing. I would not suggest this book to anyone other than a seasoned programmer. NOT a good entry level text. The examples were semi informative

Rating:
Summary: It's a book for non beginners!!!
Review: It's indeed a good book about java but in my opinion if a beginner tries to study java from this book he'll be confused and disappointed soon. Especially, chapters 5 and 6 referring to classes are really difficult. I know people who stopped studing the book in chapter 5. It worths as a second book. I mean that if you have a basic understanding of Java you may find it's examples interesting.

Rating:
Summary: One of the better choices for learning/teaching Java
Review: For teaching Java, this one stands out from the many that I was able to review in several local bookstores. The visual layout, the quality of the text, diagrams, tables and examples are all excellent. On the negative side, I feel the book becomes slightly less focused in later chapters and could use better exercises (I supply my own for my course.) It is in roughly the same class as the Deitel & Deitel Java book (second edition), a text I've grown to like in comparison to what else is available. (Deitel does have slightly better exercises.) But this book is more current than Deitel and better paced.

Rating:
Summary: The book is good and covers it all, but readability suffers
Review: I found the writer adds too many side comments and dialogs that distract from the topic. In some cases newly learned language and concepts are adopted too quickly, in other cases they are repeated to the point you find yourself skimming pages. The book size in my opinion is due to a lot of fluff.

Rating:
Summary: Great Example and clear visual/textual english explanations
Review: Horton used the right combination of pictures, words and WORKING examples along w/ chunks of code to explain a wide array of examples. Being a Kernigan and Ritchie C-Fan I love short references thus, why I have the Nutshell reference, but Java is Big and one should have a big example reference also to understand the concepts, and many features of java. Great work and a book that will be a foundation to many advanced concepts; e.g., data structures, jdbc, rmi .. etc.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent for beginners to Java or programming in general.
Review: So far this is an excellent book. I've only had time to get through 5 chapters, including an intro to object-oriented design. But so far, the book is simple, streightforward, chock-full of clear examples (though there are some errors here and there, so go to Wrox's web site to get a list - also available there are answers to all the exercises at the end of each chapter). This is a great book for those who don't have experience in object-oriented design, and perhaps not even in programming in general. Horton goes first into the syntax and basic structures of doing basic arithmatic, string manipulation, etc. Once the reader has had 4 chapters of learning about and trying out these functions, only then does he begin to tackle the more daunting subject of object-oriented programming. But by this time, the reader is so familiar with Java's basic syntax, that this topic is not as daunting as it might be if it were introduced in the first or second chapter of a book, like most of them out there. Now if only Horton/Wrox could come out with a similar text on JavaScript!

Rating:
Summary: Definately Not for beginners
Review: The author definately knows what he's talking about yet he teaches Java as if his audience were genius rocket scientists. This is a good book to come back to once you've got a firm grip on Java. This book is definately not for beginners; very steep learning curve.

Rating:
Summary: Not a book for beginners
Review: I absolutely agree with the reader from Austria. Don't buy this book if you have no or little programming experience. Plus this book is not very readable because the writig style is not concise and to the point.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent textbook and comprehensive language overview book
Review: I'm using this book for the Java courses at ZDU and it covers the Java language more thoroughly than I've seen any book cover any language (with the possible exception of the out of print textbook I wrote on C <G>)