Customer Reviews

Java: Practical Guide for Programmers (The Practical Guides)

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

 

 

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.

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?

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.

I'm constantly bouncing between programming languages. It's difficult to remember syntax when you do that. This book has always been one of my favorites when I need to step back into Java. It cuts straight to the point and gives just the right amount of examples. I used it when I first started learning Java. I use it now when it's been six months since I've touched the language. It's not for novice programmers. I get tired of 800 page programming books with useless analogies. Just say this is how you make a class, an if, while or for statement and move on. This book does just that.

As the book's title shows, it's just a guide, a simple guide that you can not expect too much details out from it. Before learning Java, I am a Delphi coder. So, I was looking for some book to transfer me from Delphi to Java quickly. Within merely 170-odd pages, Sikora brings you an overview of the Java language. I think this guide just right fits my taste. Another thing to be mentioned, if you are a serious coder, a detailed reference is necessary. As what I am doing now, Java 2, The Complete Reference is by far the most suitable book for me, after I have an bird's eye view from Sikora's guide.