I purchased this book for a beginning computer science class. I had/have no background in computer science or Java, and I found this book to be incredibly helpful. It obviously cannot cover all the idiosyncrasies of the Java language and libraries, but it covers enough of the fundamentals to make learning/using more advanced concepts a bit smoother down the road.
I haven't tried the CD, but it apparently contains some examples of small applications outlined in the book.
2 side notes:
1) There are a few typos in some of the exercises, but 99.99% of the book is fine.
2) I used the Eclipse platform (Eclipse.org) for the exercises in this book. I haven't tried BlueJ or JavaBeans, so I don't know how relevant this book would be with those platforms.