Customer Reviews

Computing Concepts with Java Essentials

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

This text is not designed to teach one to program in Java... its true purpose is to teach somebody who has *NEVER* programmed before (such as me) the basic concepts of Computer Programming, and happens to use Java 2 as the environment in which that is done.

It does a very good job of that; concepts are introduced in a logical order, with plenty of examples. The use of provided classes delays the need to learn difficult concepts (i.e. the provided ConsoleReader handles keyboard input) until basic programming concepts are learned.

This book's main purpose was to teach the computing concepts using a little bit of Java. Don't plan on learning enough about the Java language itself to make something useful. I was deceived because I saw the words "Java 2" on the cover in big print. I guess one really can't blame the author for it because it does say "Computing Concepts w/ Java2 Essentials." It was still a disappointment to me since I wanted to learn Java from this book first. Of course, the price of this book is WAY too much for what it teaches. But if you want to learn just Computing Concepts, go ahead and buy it...however, I wouldn't recommend it =P

This book was bad..... in organization, setup, explanation, and examples.... If you want a good java book, LEWIS and LOFTUS is great. I regretfully have to buy BIG JAVA another Horstman great for a class. I sure hope its better than this one!

The presentation was very dry, but it's because it's an academic book. Don't expect that because it's Java, a hot IT technology, the book will have a great presentation. Another thing that was frustrating was the way the author smeared problems all over the book and never included solutions to them on the CD - that's useless to me. Overall, it delivered like any other academic book.

If you want a better experience learning Java I recommend Wrox's Beginning Java 2 SDK 1.4 Edition, by Ivor Horton. You get more pages, better explanations, wider range of topics, better index... the works. ...

I'm baffled by some of the criticism in the other reviews for this book. This book is not only extremely well organized, but is written at an appropriate level for students who are learning how to program. The code is available to users and seems to compile just fine with various compilers. I may have a second printing, but there are very few errors. Also, the applets chapter can be skipped if that isn't your cup of tea. Have a look at this book yourself. Students and instructors alike have been please with it here.

Interestingly, I attend San Jose State University, and the author of this book is a profesor at this university.

To establish my credibility, I'm quite an experienced programmer. I've taken quite a few programming classes and have never received anything less than an A.

But I've never touched Java before, and this book totally confuses me. It keeps referencing back and forth different classes/methods with similiar names, and in the end I'm completely lost.

Even at the beginning of this book, it discusses some concepts that just wouldn't make sense at all to a beginner. I'm glad this is not my first programming book, or I wouldn't have any idea what the first chapter is all about.

Too bad for me, this is required for my Java course, so I'm stuck with it. If you're not required to own this book, AVOID IT.

Calm down, calm down. The title of this book has neither '..in a week', nor '..in 24 hours and certainly not '..while you drive to work' in its title.

It teaches you the 'concepts' and 'essentials' of Java programming. It doesn't cover IO in detail nor threads, nor games programming. When you've finished this book then you will be ready to tackle those difficult topics that are well covered by Reilly's animal series. The main theme running through the book is the progressive development of an interactive bank account. I can recommed this book to absolute beginners or those not familiar with object orientated programming.

Bonus points go to the first half of the book. Minus points go to coverage of IO.

There are lots of people dissatisfied with this book, myself included. I really don't understand how anyone can find this book cohesive, and the little bit of information you get out of it you have to dissect the text for hours to get any meaning from it. This book loves to give you code to use and not tell you what in the world it does, just that you need it. So you use it for chapters then boom, in chapter 9 your finally tells something about it. That is not constructive. The learning process does not work this way. Most of the time the book hardly tells you anything. You can see that certain things must come before others, but not told why and with out being told what the code really does; its mostly just guessing why. I understand that the goal of the book is to teach programming and not a specific language, but this book does not successfully do that when it doesn't tell you what is going on. In my opinion, it confuses you to what is going on and you have to "unthink" what you've learned to actually progress with another book. I gave up completely on the book for my class and turned to outside sources to pass. Most of my classmates have been forced to do the same.

If you've read "The C Programming Language" and enjoyed the style of its presentation, you'll likely find this book appalling. The book is neither concise, nor lucid; you wade your way through endless explaination and come out with little understanding. I've found the examples and the presentation on Sun's website to be much easier to understand, simply because they start with a clear example, discuss it a bit, then give the details of each statement (much like Kernighan's book).

Also, some of the code can't simply be typed in and compiled. In one section, they fail to mention, either in the text or in the example, that you need to import a certain class. The documentation on Sun's website is excellent, but that shouldn't make it acceptable to leave details out of the text.

Finally, the price is a total rip-off. I was fortunate enough to get the book used for under $20, but I would feel cheated if I had paid more. A lot of the information can be gotten for free, and that the quality of the free information often exceeds that which is in the book. Sadly, this book seems to fit the "intro to programming" niche, and a lot of students will be forced to buy it for those classes, allowing the publisher to get away with the high price.

This text is a nightmare. Terms are poorly defined, if defined at all, and examples are few and far between. The illustrations are laughable. I've seen better graphics in nursery books written 30 years ago. If your professor assigns this text, and you're new to Java, be prepared to shell out more bucks for better sources or cruise the Internet to get the answers you need. This book won't provide them.