The Java Tutorial: A Short Course on the Basics (5th Edition) Book Review

If you are interested in getting started with Java, or just object oriented programming, this is a great book to start with. The book starts off with a high level overview of the Java platform and goes straight into an example of creating a hello world application. While creating the hello world application the authors take you on a tour of the NetBeans IDE. It then covers the basics of 0bject-oriented programming and the Java programming language. The authors cover objects, classes, inheritance, interfaces, packages, variables, operators, expressions, statements, blocks, and control flow statements. After the introduction chapter the chapters begin to go into detail about each of the topics that were introduced, and many more. I have listed the chapters below. 1. Getting Started 2. Object-Oriented Programming Concepts 3. Language Basics 4. Classes and Objects 5. Interfaces and Inheritance 6. Generics 7. Packages 8. Numbers and Strings 9. Exceptions 10. Basic I/O and NIO.2 11. Collections 12. Concurrency 13. Regular Expressions 14. The Platform Environment 15. Packaging Programs in JAR Files 16. Java Web Start 17. Applets 18. Doing More with Java Rich Internet Applications 19. Deployment in Depth The coolest thing about this book is that it is available for free on Oracle's Java Tutorials web site. You can download the book by chapter in epub and mobi format, or the entire Java Tutorials web site. You can check out the entire book before you buy it. You also have the ability to search the book. Personally, when I want to learn and not simply look something up, I need printed books. After spending 8-10 hours a day staring at a computer screen the last thing I want to do is read a book from a computer screen. When you download the web site you get all the sample code that accompanies the chapters. The downloaded web site also includes trails and lessons are only available as web pages with the download or online. All the samples are available in .java and .class formats. The book ends with an Appendix titled Preparing for Java Programming Language Certification. It contains outlines of the topics you need to know for three of the Oracle certification examinations, and points to the chapters you should read and study. The author's writing style makes this book an easy cover to cover read, but it also makes a great reference. All in all I highly recommend this book to those getting started with Java or anyone that wants to start learning what 0bject-oriented programming is all about.

The Java Tutorial: A Short Course on the Basics (5th Edition)