Customer Reviews

Complete Java 2 Training Course, The (4th Edition) (Boxed Set)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you learn more efficiently by a combination of reading and multimedia, this is definetly the purchase for you. However, this is a text book and can be fairly dry and somewhat overwhelming. There is an immense amount of information contained in this package. If you don't have any programming experience, I would not recommend this as your first foray into application development. Another BIG drawback is unless you are a teacher/professor, you won't be able to obtain the answers to the excercises. For some, this might be considered a critical flaw. If you can make it through this text and multimedia offering, you will be well on your way to mastering Java. I have a previous edition of this text and the current edition is a considerable improvment.

In response to a previous review, I hardly think that requiring Internet Explorer is a substantive reason to avoid this highly intelligent and thorough package. I think most people in the business have better things to do that rehash a tired old argument about microsoft vesus the rest of the computing industry. While I have all but entirely switched to Linux, I can't deny that my career and the careers of most of the people I work with, can be substantially attributed to Microsoft's proliferation over the past twenty-five years. Let's move on.

What I mean by that is I was under the impression that the highly touted Cyber Classroom would be a significant addition to the book. I purchased their C# how to program and felt I was missing something by not having the Cyber classroom portion of that book by the way they and others talked about all you received in it. When I was looking to purhcase this title I decided to get the edition with the Cyber Classroom to get the full benefit as everyone said. I am not trashing the cyber classroom as it does provide all the code samples in the book with many of them accompanied by an audio description explaining what the code does. Also you can click on a lighting bolt and the code will run right from within the Cyber classroom. For me the LiveCode aspect is not a benefit to me as I like to type the code in myself when learning a new language to get ingrained in its syntax, but that's my personal way of working and I can see how it may benefit others so I am not knocking it. Aside from that, the Cyber classroom is really just the book on CD--correction; it does allow you to take an assessment exam after you complete a chapter and keeps track of your score for each exam taken. It isn't a comprehensive tracking of your score; however, just a simple score showing the percentage of the questions you got wrong. I didn't find the assessment exams to be challenging, which isn't bad because their simplicity helps reinforce the points in the chapter. However, when you want to really test your understanding and want to challenge yourself by doing the end of chapter excercises you will be up the creek alone. As stated by another reviewer, you do not get many answers to the excercises at the end of the chapters. The end of chapter excercises in my opinion are what really challenge you and not to have answers to at least half, well, kind of sucks. I realize that this text is used in colleges and all answers cannot be given, however, each chapter has at least 30+ excercises, yet they only give on average answers to 2 - 3 problems in the cyber classroom--and many of these aren't the really challenging ones. With 30+ excercises per chapter I think answers to more that 2 or 3 problems wouldn't kill professors. Kind of kills the challenge aspect. Granted you'll know if you got it right if your program works, but I always like to see how someone else would have solved it and I usually learn more form that.

In ending, I WOULD recommend the book but, unless you like not having to type code when learning a language or like to read a book on screen and have the code examples executed at the click of a button, I cannot recommend the entire course--in my opinion it doesn't add all that much to it. If you are an absolute newbie to programming I say go for it though.

Having just purchased your - "The Complete Java™ Training Course" I have found the cyber classroom to be an excellent addition to the book.

Prior to purchasing "The Complete Java™ Training Course" I had previously bought the "Visual Basic 6 How to Program" text book. However I was unaware of the cyber classroom add-on to the text books. These are an execellent add-on to the textbooks and worth the extra price, which are available via the companys affiliate website.

The book is expertly written, guiding you through all aspects of Java programming whilst providing well explained examples, performance tips, programming tips, error avoidance tips etc.

You will strugle to put the book down and refrain from using the quality cyber classroom multimedia CD.

Do not fear Java! Learn to work with it, after all you will be learning one of the most sought after skills in the I.T industry.

I bought this book as an additional book for my course in Java programming. It proved to be a quite useful book on its own. It contains many examples, pointers and theory. I found extremely useful the source code examples it provides. Especially the coloured text that Deitel adopts makes the code extremely easy to read. They could have added more comments though. The CD is also very useful, containing a few chapters. I haven't used the extra two cd's with the JAVA lessons because I do not have time to try it. But I read about its content and it sounds really promising. About those who study Software engineering, the book also contains many examples of UML diagrams, which I found extremely helpful. It makes the connection between Java and UML more clear and helped me a lot to understand much of UML's theory, through practice.

I am only a beginer at JAVA, and I think this book is an excelent choice of book for someone like me.

Writing again to correct a previous review of this course. Turns out that there are more answers to the problems on the CD, but the CyberClassroom has a few more answers in the cyber interface...that's where conclusion of 2-3 answers came from in my first review. For that I have bumped up the rating to 4 stars..

Come on... that's rediculous. Microsoft is one of the most anti-java companies out there, and all they can do is base their included CD-ROM on this?

What a waste.