This is an excellent book, one of the very few for TEACHING Advance Java using Borland JBuilder3 RAD. There are a lot of Advance Java books out in the market but virtually all of them are what I would refer to as "reference books" .... this one by Dr. Liang is a teaching text book.
This is a book for you only if you already KNOW the java fundamentals ... e.g. classes, inheritance, AWT, interfaces, etc. and you want to extend that knowledge into the advance aspects of Java such as Java Beans, Swing classes, JDBC, etc.
I use this text by manually typing in all of Liang's example programs ... they all work. The only glitch I found was a few programs that required user's local resource (e.g. "images/indiana.gif" was not supplied) but didn't bother to mention it to the reader.
Enterprise Java Beans and Swing Classes are covered thoroughly. I wish there were more on RMI, Corba and something on Servlets.
Buy this book if you want to learn some of the advanced aspects of Java using JBuilder3.