Java: Practical Guide for Programmers (The Practical Guides) [Paperback]

Michael Sikora (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1558609091 | ISBN-13: 978-1558609099 | Publication Date: January 6, 2003 | Edition: 1

If you're an experienced programmer, you already have a rock-solid foundation for learning Java. All you need is a resource that takes your experience into account and explains Java's key principles and techniques in an intelligent, efficient way.

Java: Practical Guide for Programmers is precisely that resource. Here, you won't have to wade through hundreds of pages of overly simplistic material to learn the basics of Java programming. Instead, you get highly focused instruction in the core elements of Java 1.4, accompanied by carefully chosen examples and line-by-line analyses that are right to the point. You'll be astonished at how soon you can begin productive coding in Java, and how quickly your skills will progress.

Web resources:
Source code from the book is no longer available at
http://www.zm.sikora.btinternet.co.uk/source.html
Please press the 'Companion Page' button on the upper right side of this page to access a zip file containing it.

Sun J2SE download page
http://java.sun.com/j2se/downloads.html

Sun J2SE API documentation
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.1/docs/index.html

* Written expressly for people who already know a procedural or object-oriented programming language.
* Takes a concise approach designed to make the most of the experience you already have.
* Covers the core elements of Java 1.4, including language syntax, OO features, collections, exception handling, input/output, threads, event handling, and Swing components.
* Filled with incisive coding examples and line-by-line analyses.
* Via a companion Web site, provides downloadable example code and links to additional resources.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Java: Practical Guide for Programmers efficiently gives the experienced programmer a turbo jumpstart on the Java language. Readers will be surprised how fast they can grasp the language essentials. My students have been searching for this book for years!"
--An Ngoc Lam
Sr. Software Engineer, 3PARdata Inc.
Computer Science Instructor, University of California at Santa Cruz

Book Description

Focused instruction on the core elements of Java 1.4 with clear straight-forward examples and line-by-line analysis for experienced programmers.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 150 pages
• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann; 1 edition (January 6, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558609091
• ISBN-13: 978-1558609099
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,607,352 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Java for self-starters, May 11, 2003

By 

Celia Redmore "Celia Redmore" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Java: Practical Guide for Programmers (The Practical Guides) (Paperback)

If I could only recommend one book to an experienced programmer who wanted to learn Java it would be this one. It's only 170 pages long and it doesn't contain anything that's unnecessary. But it does cover syntax, flow control, classes and methods, inheritance, exception handling, file I/O, GUI's, collections and threads. That's genuinely Java in a nutshell.

The author can offer such a stripped-down book, of course, because he assumes that the reader already understands programmatic flow control and objects, and can follow a basic inheritance hierarchy without tedious explanation.

Java isn't a difficult language: it can merely be made to seem so by textbooks that bury simple facts under mountains of verbiage. I hope other authors will take Zbigniew Sikora's "Java: Practical Guide for Programmers" as a model for textbooks for busy people.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A CONCISE Java Grammar!, June 1, 2006

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WhoAmI (USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Java: Practical Guide for Programmers (The Practical Guides) (Paperback)

I love this little one. From time to time, between working through and losing myself in half dozen or more heavy tomes of Java book, I would come back to this little one to get a grip of fundamentals and essentials. The book is concise and no nonsense. I also like the banking application sample code. Practical enough. Who doesn't bank?

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars quickly learn Java?, September 23, 2005

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Java: Practical Guide for Programmers (The Practical Guides) (Paperback)

Indeed, Sikora offers a quick start to learning Java. He eshews an exhaustive enumeration of every core class in J2SE. Instead, he takes several high level topics and explains which common classes deal with these. A question arises. Can you indeed learn Java from so slender a book? Perhaps. Sikora teaches a core functionality. Made easier if you have already programmed in some other language.

For graphics, he leads you right into Swing. No time wasted on the earlier and inferior AWT classes.

For input/output, Java is more powerful than C or C++, but concomitantly harder to use. The coding is far more verbose, compared to a simple printf() or scanf() in C, for example. The minimal descriptions in Java given here are admirable in how he found the essence of enough to be useful.