Customer Reviews

Java: A Beginner's Guide, 4th Ed.

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

 

 

Some computer books are nothing but dry text, and others are so full of intense graphics that your eyes burn. This book strikes an ideal balance between those extremes. The teaching style is engaging, and there's also plenty of reference material, making this a great book to start with and keep handy as you advance.

This is an amazing book. I retired from engineering research 16 years ago and have not done any programming since. Things have changed a lot! (all for the better). This book has an excellent teaching style, thorough and clear. It was my second book on Java, the first being Barry Burd's "Beginning Programming with Java for Dummies". That book is a good foundational start but it has not quite kept up with the rapid pace in the development of Java. Schildt's book is up to date (JDK 6 and Java SE 6) and makes a great reference work on the subject. I recommend it highly.

I read this book to get a good start with Java. It's an excellent book to pick up if you have little/no java background or if it's been a while. I used this to build my foundation then went through a certification book and passed the scjp 5.

This book may be good if you can sit down and work your way through it from beginning to end, but I prefer the Sun Java tutorial online. I got through the first 5 chapters in this book and was still shaky with the concepts. Somehow it missed conveying the big picture to me. When I then went to the Sun tutorial it was a big "Aha!, so that's what they were talking about." Also, the Index is sparse.

My first Java book and now my goto reference. Few programming books have that much longevity on my bookshelf. Each topic is organized well, to the point and easy to understand.

excellent beginners guide to java and OO programming.
the author was very disciplined in maintaining a 1-thing-at-a-time style. his frequent instructions to "don't worry about ... for now...we'll cover that later" allows the reader to focus on the current topic.
well written, well paced, with great examples and exercises.

Schildt is quite simply the best author to use to learn how to program in C, C++, Java, or C#. His books are very clear for a beginner, yet not too verbose like many of the other books out there. What really distinguishes this book from other similar ones is that the reader walks away from this book with a feeling of mastery of the topics covered and the confidence to be able to implement them appropriately. Many other introductory books breeze over important topics or explain them in a way that beginners find difficulty in understanding. This is far from the case with this book. Schildt has written an excellent series of books that I can easily say, taught me the foundations of programming in each respective language. Now if he only wrote guides for python and perl too...

This is a good hands-on guide for beginners to learn fundamentals of the latest version of Java SE 6. It is well presented and organized into modules which include data types and operators, program control statements, classes, objects and methods, packages and interfaces, using I/O, multithreaded programming, generics, applets and swing. I find the mastery checks at the end of each module quite useful for reviewing and testing of knowledge.

This book explains the various swing elements and their use very clearly. I specifically like the example code and the projects. There are two projects per chapter using the elements and ideas the chapter has taught. Also, their is an "answer" for each projects, which can be useful.
I also like the Kindle format. It is very convenient to have the book open on the PC Kindle reader while I work on a project. The one disadvantage of the Kindle format is the sample code. The code is an image and therefore loses the ability to have its text size easily adjusted. It would be easier to read if the sample code was formatted as text so it could be re-sized.

This book is amazing! I knew very little about Java when I got it. The way the book goes through the material is just right for beginning Java programmers.