Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours (5th Edition)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I favor this over the 'Java for Dummies' book as it is much more recent, published Nov. 2009. Plus it includes Java 6. Very entertaining to read. Lessons are taught using the NetBeans IDE, which is supported on the Mac -- the 'Dummies' book uses JCreator which is Windows only. Definitely recommended for the absolute novice with little to zero programming experience.

Sam's Teach Yourself JAVA in 24 Hours, 5th Edition, by Rogers Cadenhead, is a decent introductory text for those wanting to get a basic hands-on exposure to the JAVA programming language. You will cover most of the major topics that are needed in any programming environment. However, don't expect to be a JAVA programmer when you finish working through the book. This is a quick-and-dirty book that spoon-feeds you through each chapter and various programming projects.

The initial tutorial will assist you in finding, downloading, and installing the JAVA Developer's (Programming) Kit (JDK). Netbeans is , also, found on the site. Netbeans is the Integrated Developer's Environment (IDE) used for creating, compiling , and running your programs. Other IDE's are available should you choose to research and use another.

Some of the nice features of the text are its short explanations of coding protocols. This is, also, a short-coming. You won't find any in-depth explanations to the syntax or keywords used for coding.

I, personally, had some problems with getting all the programs listed as exercises to run. Many were typos I introduced and later corrected, but others were Errata. I cannot speak for the author as to the source of these errors. They could have been introduced by the publisher when typesetting, or had worked under a different version of the JAVA JDK and Netbeans.

However, as of today, August 20, 2010, there is still no Errata page for the text. And one is definitely needed.

Lastly, a final warning, do not get creative with separating chapters and projects. This will possibly introduce glitches with the projects being unable to find other class'es that are required for inheritance issues.

Having had some previous major programming experience, I wanted to get some exposure to the JAVA language and nuances. As a text used to get familiar with both the JAVA JDK and Netbeans, I found this text a nice easy introduction before I started into serious in-depth study of the JAVA language.

I previewed several JAVA texts of this type before selecting. It is better than many others in its class, IMHO.

I bought this book, simply not knowing whether or not I would like it, and because I wanted to get a basic understanding of Java before my next college term. I have two terms of Java classes coming up for my Computer Science major. I really enjoyed how simple this book was to understand. If you spend the time to review and think about each hours lesson, you will definately come away with a basic understanding on how Java works. It's definately written in a very easy to understand for the beginner who may not know even the basic terms in Java programming. I highly reccomend this book for any beginner wishing to understand how to write in Java.

My English is not native !!!

Well, Finally I found the best book to start Java programming.
I bought few books on Java but each one has its own problem.

I really not a big fan of all the "24 hours" books But I said to myself "why not trying this one".

If you are a beginner and statements such as "Class" ," Public", "Static" etc are making nightmares to you, THIS IS THE BOOK for you !!!

please take in considiration that this book is for beginners and you will not found advanced topics such as "swing" "3D" or whatever, there is planty of books on this issues.

I dont know what with you but this book worked for me.

Thanks to Mr. Rogers Cadenhead.

I have been a programmer for over 20 years and found myself needing to learn Java. This book allowed me to lay the foundation I need to be a successful Java programmer. Two thumbs up, and if I had more thumbs, they'd all be up as well. This would be a good book even if you don't have any programming background.

Hi,
I had occasional contacts with the Java language over the last 10 years, but wanted to really start learning "how to". The title and the back cover note were decisive. I am now at hour 14 out of 24, thus I can already make some conclusions:
- the book is well written with the occasional humor to releif from the hard matter of OOP
- in most instances are the explanations reasonably explicit about the subject of the "hour". I traced a few instances where items were left in the grey
- errors in the text are absent, but I traced a few programmatic errors, like in hour13, the belief that the count of months in Java is "based 1" (January would be "1") while, for some obscure reason, this is "zero based" (January is month 0 !).
By looking at the requirements of my present projects, this book does not cover the important aspects of database integration (accessing to records in a remote MySQL database). Maybe I will turn to "Java in 21 days" (a more reasonable goal than the "24 hours" concept in this book - I needed about 10 days, devoting 2 or 3 hours each day, to complete the first 14 hours, including all proposed exercises, etc...).
Feedback to the author is available on the corresponding web site, but the reactivity of the author does not seem to be very high...

I think this is a good choice to start learning modern Java, as the pedagogy is right. I would recommend the author to be more reactive on his site about the corrections, especially those in the program examples. Similar problmes with code errors was found by other readers about the "Java in 21 days" book from same author. In the long term, this might be detrimental to him and his SAMS editors.

Robert

I bought this book wanting to learn java, even though I know visual basic this book helped me with learning what I wanted to know. This book is good for beginners and moderate programmers, you can easily skip over the parts that you know and understand, and the example it uses when it comes to writing out the programs are great and help you understand how it works.

I am currently taking my first java course and my third college programming course. I was having some trouble understanding the textbook for my course, and using the programming development kit(Eclipse, Netbeans, etc.) "Sams Teach Yourself Java in 24 hours" takes you through, step-by-step, how to start programming in java using short, hour or less, lessons(including writing a complete program each time).

Because I do have some previous programming experience, I was able to skip(or skim quickly) through some of the lessons. It doesn't assume that you know anything about programming but doesn't drag out if you do. Each lesson builds on the last lesson. Each lesson also follows a different, real life, application of what you are learning. It is not the same boring application every single lesson. First lesson: "hello, World!"(of course). Another lesson: display the credits of a movie(Not all of them). Yet another lesson: build a graphical interface for playing media. This book is an easy read. I did 15 lessons the first day.

The biggest help was with using "Netbeans": how to install"Netbeans", how to create a new file, how to run different files, how to debug, plus more.

This is a fabulous introduction to java programming, and will be especially useful to anyone with any minor programming experience (I come from a minor background using bash scripting to make silly little programs in linux that do my bidding). I enjoy everything about this book: most of the chapters really do only take an hour to complete, the examples and excercises are straightforward, and the binding is excellent. Cadenhead keeps things interesting and engaging too, with humorous examples, informative sidebars, and a no-nonsense approach to learning the fundamentals of java as simply and quickly as possible. The full color page design and step-by-step instructions can get anyone whose running linux (I haven't tried netbeans - which is the recommended GUI compiler - in a windows environment yet) up and running with java more quickly than any other book I've found. I've had great success learning with the Sams series in general (I did the CSS 24 recently) and love their overall approach to the practical application of the disciplines. I was worried that such an approach wouldn't translate to learning a programming language (frequently, these kind of books cheat, and leave the reader with bad programming habits or incomplete understandings of the fundamentals in favor of "just making it work")... I was very pleasantly surprised. Anyone who wants to learn Java should (as another reviewer said) start here; the amount of quality information and instruction you get for the price is unbeatable. 5 stars, and cheers to Cadenhead: thanks for a book that finally got ME (a former English Lit Major who HATES Math, and LOATHED programming as a kid) back into the dark arts.

This book is a complete disappointment. While some things are very well explained, others are not explained well at all. Like so many technical books, terms that the reader may not be familiar with get used too often. At times, things are referred to that either had no explanation or that were merely mentioned. I am a professional programmer with 30 years experience and I was hopeful that the OOP tidbits would be well articulated as years ago I had to learn Unix on the fly and the Sams book I used was quite well written. This book claims to be for beginners and some of it is indeed on that level such as basic programming technique explanations. When it came to the Object Oriented chapters, it started well and quickly went down hill from there, leaving me frustrated and finally disgusted. I was actually amazed at the holes caused by poor or lack of explanation. When you are trying to teach beginners something as complex as OOP, you really can't be using unfamiliar terms in your explanation until you have provided the reader with a firm and comfortable understanding of those terms. I think this book is worthless because what you need to learn you would have to already know to be able to fully understand the book in the first place.

If you are looking to understand the OOP pieces of Java, do NOT bother with this one. Since this covers a good deal of the book, even if you want to learn Java, look elsewhere!