Customer Reviews

Fundamentals of Java: AP* Computer Science Essentials for the A & AB Exams

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My dad wants to learn Java, and I remember reading this book for my AP Computer Science A class and learning Java from it. Sadly, it's not in the library, nor is it in any Barnes and Noble or Borders bookstore. The books they have are of the line Java for Dummies or Java in X days, and man are they horrible. I actually saw one Java book at Borders from Schildt, and thought it might be good seeing the good reviews and all, but the thing is, it's not for beginners at all. Someone from C++ or another language would be able to understand (especially from his many C++ references and notes through the book) but from all the books I've looked through, none of them looked like it would be good for a beginner in programming.

This book however worked for me and several others in my class. I won't say it's the absolute BEST book for Java, especially for the experienced, but is pretty darned good for beginners who want to learn some good programming concepts.

The one thing I really loved about this book was the programming exercises at the end of each chapter. There are like 8-10 of these in each chapter ranging from easy, to medium, to hard and really, the best way to learn a programming language is to just do it yourself. Too many of the horrible books I saw above didn't have too many exercises, just blabbered pages and pages of theory.

If you do get this book, each chapter has a "special" GUI section at the end of the chapter. I would highly advise you to avoid these until you read the entire book, because these GUI sections come at very odd times when you haven't even learned a particular thing for the gui, but the section uses it anyway without much explanation and you get really frustrated.

Other than this, I would highly recommend this book as it is what got me interested in programming in the first place... although I hate Java because it's programs are slow, but anyway, get it if you're a beginner wanting to learn Java. Java is a great beginner language in my opinion it teaches you many good programming concepts the right way - more than, say, Visual Basic.

Also, while learning Java, I highly recommend using the free IDE JGrasp to prgram in.

Thanks for reading!

The book arrived soon after it was ordered. It was in good shape as advertised. Thanks for the great service.

For some reason my university chose this book for their intro to java class. A better choice would be Ditel's books on java and other programming languages. I wouldn't recommend this book.