Beginning Java

by Ivor Horton, Kerry Hammil, William Bilow, et al.

Focusing on showing users how they can achieve success with Java, this book builds their confidence, enabling them to experiment and develop their own applications at an early stage. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1861000278
• ISBN13: 9781861000279
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Wrox Press
• Length: 1039 Pages
• Weight: 3.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.3" x 7.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Excellent Beginner's Book

Having attempted (and failed) to learn Java thru tutorials, software documentation, and several other books, I came across this book and I suddenly started to get somewhere.This book starts at the beginning and requires that you build your knowledge from the fundamental concepts.Learning Java is not easy. It is a very complex language and getting more complex with each new release. Adding to the difficulty is the Object Oriented nature of Java. You have to learn a new language and a new programming paradigm in order to be successful using Java. This book addresses both of these requirements and ties them together better than any other book or tutorial I have tried.Some of the explanations for OO concepts and application in Java were the best I've ever seen and definately brought me to the "Aha" point.Now I understand the concepts and am able to create useful programs of my own. Other texts left me with a lot of jargon, trivial examples, and no transferable skill. Great book - read this and do the work before you try anything else.

This book is simply a work of a genuis!!!

This book is really the bibel of java programming. Eventhough I was not a newcomer to java and programming as well it amazed me how easy Mr. Horton manages to explain complex programming example through an easy understood language. I can say it is simply the buy I have ever when it comes to computerbooks. This book gets all my recommendations to newcomers and more exsperienced programmers who want to see that some terms of programming can really be done in an easier and more proper way than they've ever dreamed about.The best regards from Daniel Mersebak.

Excellent

No competition! Well-paced, explanations are appropriate, well edited, insightful. An epic. Took me 6 months (approx 30 hrs/week).

the most through and detailed book this side of the api

This book does what no other book does- it goes over all the major topics in near exhaustive detail. Most books sort of pick and choose what parts of the language they go over- the parts that interest the author who already knows the subject.You never know what they're leaving out until you go to extend the examples or create your own, then the issues that the author has not mentioned suddenly stand out in bold relief. Maybe those issues are boring to the author or elementary, but elementary details will stop a compiler as dead as interesting bugs. With Horton, it's ALL there. For instance, his treatment of access specifiers and the keywords final, abstract, static, and how they can modify or be applied to fields, methods, classes, and interfaces and what happens when you throw in extension, and implementation is exhaustive and readable. Ditto for his treatment of Exceptions and then again I/O. Sure, there are high level issues and especially gnarly situations that can arise that aren't covered (see The Java Programming Language by Gosling and Arnold for examples), but no book can contain all of Java, especially if you're going to cover it to the level of detail that Horton covers it- the level that programmers NEED to have it at for code to compile. You can download the code from Wrox, and it runs without exception. Thanks Wrox!The examples are the right length, The diagrams are simple, inventive and clarify the issues they address. Each and every move he makes in code is explained in micro-detail in the section that follows each example called "How It Works".No unexplained mystery code here. No glossing over things because they're too tedious to explain well. If you want to start from nothing and turn yourself into a competent Java programmer, then this is the place to start, without qualification.We all owe a big "thanks!" to Horton for his reliably even and readable writing style, and for consistently keeping the point of view of his readers in mind, something which is the result of hard work, plain and simple. I read an interview with him at Wrox's site, and I was not surprised to see that he has a real passion for explaining things clearly for beginners.If this book were not on the market, there would be a gap in Java pedagogy big enough to drive a truck through. Thanks to Wrox's editors and thanks to Horton.