Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Java 1.1 in 21 Days (Teach Yourself in 21 Days)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

The book is very good for beginners. Lemay has done a nice job. The first 13 chapters written by Lemay are too good. However things get horrible after that. Perkins has done a poor job in his part of the book. The chapter on Multithreading is extremely weak.It finishes off in a few pages and does not even mention wait()/notify(). After chapter 13 the more further one reads the more bad the writing becomes. The chapter on JNI is absolutely incomprehensible. However the last chapter on JVM is good.Some important topics are not even mentioned in this book for none of the util classes like vector etc is covered. AWT is covered in 2 chapters but more detail is required . Some important concepts are not given like how to clone a object or how to use a StreamTokenizer class. The chapter on I/O has been just copied from API documentation -- don't try to learn I/O from this book. The networking chapter is also very poor. Too much focus on applets. No mention of the date and time classes.

Apart from these, advanced topics are not covered in this book : like JDBC, JavaBeans, RMI or the newer 1.2 APIs like Swing,2D,EJB,JTS etc. But I will not complain about that because it is a beginner's book and there are are specialized books for each of the latter topics. Considering all these shortcomings, I will still recommend any beginner to buy this book because overall it is a good book. In fact, many may get angry at me if I say this, but still in my opinion the basic part of Java in this book is better covered than even Core Java (I have read it). Also the book is much cheaper than other beginner's book on Java. Overall a good buy . By the way, if you learn Java from this book, don't forget to buy the companion book: Teach yourself More Java in 21 days by Morisson.

Currently I am a freshy in college and taking computer science but the problem is I wasn't much familier with all these computer languages, but I did know Visual Basic and pascal very good and had work with these 2 programming languages. I am taking java corse in schoool next semister so I thought I would just get my hands on java and see what it is and I ended up buying 3 books on java and what I found was that this book is great for beginers, Again ONLY GOOD FOR BEGINERS, the compiler (jdk) which comes with this book is not user freindly but you always can download the newer and much better version of jdk from sun.java.com ...... that's what I did. Well after all if you have a little bite of programming knowledge in VB, C or pascal this book will teach you JAVA, I am talking about JAVA... but see this book claims that you can finish it up in 21 days but try not to finish up in 21 days, I finished up in about 2 months, java is not like VB you have to spend some time with it and just play with it. I can Say now that I know JAVA.

I would say The Beginning is very good for people having no concept of OOPS and want to start with Java programming specially Laura Lemay, I would say is one of the best autor and having given good practical examples. However as soon as Charles L. Perkins takes over we are loosing our tracks totally. It cannot be useful because even a simple thing has made so complicated that it will cause you to think as if it is very difficult and there are no examples which you can try and understand. I am not sure want author is trying to achieve. I would suggest to new learners please don't even think of reading Charles L. Perkins portion, it will misguide you and you may loose your further interest in Learning Java

I felt Laura Lemay did a great job for the first 13 chapters, she has a way with words. The remaining chapters were understandable, but some of the concepts were relatively muddled. Perhaps multiple authors (including Laura) on most of those were the cause. (And perhaps it was simply that I read the book without coding any of it. What I'm saying is: It's so well written, this PowerBuilder developer learned Java without sitting in front of a tube).

The final chapter, "Under the Hood", lived up to its title and tied it all together well. I picked up and layed down several other Java books due to frustration over bad grammar, redundancy, editing mistakes or ludicrous example code. This doesn't suffer from those problems. Very good read, overall. Can't wait to dig into "Teach Yourself Java 2 Platform in 21 Days".

I'm reading the spanish version of this book, and it's great for begginers with Java. I know C++ and I think that the book make interesting comparantions between these two languajes. The Java Development Kit attached at this book is unfriendly, but if you have a software like Visual J++, the learning proccess is interesting and fast.

i do not find this book to be helpful. It is confusing and poorly organized. In addition, the sample code is full of errors.

The title really fools you to believe that you can learn Java in 21 days. But the fact is you won't learn Java in 21 YEARS, using this book. If you already know Java, may be this book is good for a reference....brushing up on what you know. But, if you don't know the language at all and you thought you wanted to learn it in 21 days (at least that's what the Title fools you into believing), then you will definitely be sorry. It is like someone asking you to put a puzzle together, without giving you a picture of what you need to put together. The sample codes, most of them, are very ambiguous. Actually I was going to give it zero stars...unfortunately there was no option for it.

This book is one of the better introductory books to Java, especially for people who have done programming in some other languages. However, if you're serious about learning Java in a hurry, you should probably also buy a software package such as Symantec Visual Cafe, an integrated Java development and debugging tool.

I am a student and this was our text book.. I have had to go out and buy 2-3 supplimental books because I couldn't follow this book, if anything I have used it for a notebook.. What an incredible waste of time and $$. Our instructor wasn't happy that we had to us this book in the first place. Not the best for beginners to follow, its good as a reference book and that's about it!

This is an excellent introduction to Java programmming. I was able to learn to program in about a month by doing all of the exercises as I went. LeMay is an excellent author of instructive material. However, her co-authors leave a lot to be desired in their chapters.

The book suffers from an incomplete transition from the Java 1.0.2 version that preceded it. I look forward to reading the Java 1.2 version in the hopes that the transition has been completed and the co-authors have been dropped.