Customer Reviews

Essential Java 2 fast: How to develop applications and applets with Java 2 (Essential Series)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

IMHO this is a gem of a book for the right audience: good programmers who like concise information. It doesn't try to teach programming and is skimpy on the O-O approach (get Bruce Eckel's "Thinking in Java" for that). It DOES cover basic Java 2 clearly and quickly, and the examples are brief and very focussed. Java is a huge language (you may want a good reference book in addition), but this short book succeeds in covering all the essentials. Even Swing is covered to a very useful depth. I have some minor quibbles, e.g. Exceptions should be covered much earlier in the book, but I highly recommend this book.

Important note: I do NOT recommend the earlier edition, "Essential Java Fast," because it describes a pre-1.0 version of Java unlike any available version. Avoid!

I can only now after reading about three books on Java give this book a fair review. I gave it three stars primarily because right on the front cover it say applications and applets, yet this book is more than 90% devoted to applets. After reading a few books on Java I have found applets to be completely useless. The book is clear and well written and if you want to learn applets it is great. Also I would not recommend this book to any one that has absolutely no knowledge about Java. The title of the book says fast and it isn't lying. The author explains one topic and immediately moves to the next.

If you are a structured programmer (e.g. Pascal or Fortran) and want to make the jump to Java programming, then this is your book. I have bought several other introductory Java books and they are just two thick and tedious at the beginning for someone with programming experience. While several of them have better explanations of the concepts and history of object oriented programming, this book is great for all the good stuff in a short and effecient manner.

I've read a number of begining java book and this one is definitly the best to start with. Other "introductory" programming books have a tendancy to throw out too much infomation all at once and give conveluded descriptions of the basics. This book gives excellent examples of the basics of java and object oriented programming. It covers more effectively in just over 200 pages than books 3 times its size. There are many aspects to this language that are specific and can be learned elsewhere but for the beginner to java this is the one you definitly want to start with.

As a newbie to the Java world, I found the book excellent, especially the "hands on" examples.

In order to gain the most from the book, one must patiently and devotedly work through the examples that Cowell has given.
There are a few mistakes within the code, as well as a few missing 'import' statements, but I found this to provide an additional challenge to 'getting' the examples up and running.

Over all, the author's style is excellent as are his descriptions/comments of why he does, what he does.

Personally, I do not think that one will go wrong with purchasing this book. I have certainly learnt quite a bit.

After reading a few Java books, I've found this book to be effective in delivering java concepts fast and efficiently. This is NOT a reference book but a book intended for those who'd like a good overall basic knowledge of the language in a few weeks. It's written relatively simply with easy examples relating to real-life objects and not abstract mathematical formulas (some of us are no good at maths). Finally, you will need some idea of OO concepts before tackling this book.

If you are trying to learn Java, buy this book! Period.