Effective Java by Joshua Bloch  (16)  £19.99

Head First Design Patterns (Head First) by Eric Freeman  (30)  £20.77

Head First Java (Head First) by Kathy Sierra  (19)  £20.99

Java Concurrency in Practice by Brian Goetz  (2)  £17.39

SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5 Study Guide (Exam 310-055): Study Guide Exam 310-055 (Certification Press) by Katherine Sierra  (36)  £16.49

› Explore similar items : Books (49)

Amazon.co.uk Review
Programming languages have similarities with general purpose languages such as Spanish. You might know enough Spanish to cobble together a simple letter or read a poster but the real breakthrough comes when you can think in it. Thinking in Java attempts to improve your understanding to the point where you can think about a programming problem in Java rather than in English or whatever and then translate it. This fits extremely well with the basic Java ethos, which is to enable you to frame a problem in terms of the Java objects you'll use to provide a solution.

Eckel approaches teaching you to think in Java by introducing a topic, talking around it to put it in context, providing examples to try and then discussing them in depth. Each chapter has a summary followed by exercises. The book is structured for someone coming from a procedural language background. Eckel spends a lot of time on OOP concepts in general and the way in which it's implemented in Java. After covering operators Eckel goes on to program flow, initialisation and garbage collection, packages, class reuse, polymorphism and so on all the way up to distributed programming (servlets) and appendices on passing objects, the JNI, guidelines and resources. The whole book is also on CD (in several formats including HTML) with the source code (guaranteed to compile under Linux using Java 1.2.2). The CD also contains Thinking in C: Foundations for C++and Java.

Thinking In Java is basically a tutorial. You're intended to read it linearly and work the exercises. It helps that it's well written but it helps even more to have a programming background. If not, you'll probably want a straight Java reference to hand as well. --Steve Patient

Book Description
Bruce Eckel's legendary, award-winning Thinking In Java, Third Edition -- now fully updated and revised for JDK 1.4.
The much-anticipated revision of Bruce Eckel's best-selling introduction to Java- the book that won the 1999 Software Development Magazine Productivity Award, and the Java Developer's Journal Editor's Choice Award for best book of 1998!
CD-ROM includes all code examples and an electronic copy of the book. Thinking in Java, Third Edition is the much-anticipated revision of Bruce Eckel's best-selling introduction to Java. In Thinking in Java, 3/e, Bruce Eckel provides complete integration of JDK 1.4 technologies to his award winning 'Thinking in' presentation. Eckel introduces all the basics of objects as Java uses them, then walks carefully through the fundamental concepts underlying all Java programming -- including program flow, initialization and cleanup, implementation hiding, reusing classes, and polymorphism. Using extensive, to-the-point examples, he introduces exception handling, Java I/O, run-time type identification, and passing and returning objects. Eckel also provides an overview of the Key Technology of the Java2 Enterprise Edition platform (J2EE). Thinking in Java won the 1999 Software Development Magazine Productivity Award, and the Java Developer's Journal Editor's Choice Award for best book of 1998!
Bruce Eckel is the author of Thinking in C++, which won the Software Development Jolt Award for best book on 1995. He's been professionally programming for 20 years and has been teaching people throughout the world how to program with objects since 1986, first as a reknowned speaker and consultant on C++ and now in Java. He was a voting member of the C++ Standards Committee, has written 5 other books on object-oriented programming, published over 150 articles, and has been a columnist for various computer magazines, including the Java columnist for Web Techniques. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Product Description

Effective Java by Joshua Bloch  (16)  £19.99

Head First Java (Head First) by Kathy Sierra  (19)  £20.99

Agile Java: Crafting Code with Test-Driven Development (Robert C. Martin) by Jeff Langr  (2)  £28.79

Java in a Nutshell (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)) by David Flanagan  (2)  £20.99

Java: How to Program by Inc., (Harvey & Paul) Deitel & Associates  (1)  £47.99

› Explore similar items : Books (47)

28 Reviews 5 star:  (19) 4 star:  (5) 3 star:    (0) 2 star:  (2) 1 star:  (2)           Average Customer Review (28 customer reviews)		Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews   11 of 11 people found the following review helpful: Comprehensive and great coverage of Java 5.0 features, 2 April 2006 By A Customer This review is from: Thinking in Java (Paperback) I will preface my comments by saying that this is not a suitable book for those seeking to learn Java. Java novices should seek out Head First Java, and follow up with the excellent Agile Java. You are then ready to take on this book. Widely regarded as one of the best books on Java, the 4th edition of Thinking in Java, covering Java 5.0, was a long time coming. It was well worth the wait, however. Admittedly, it starts slowly. The first couple of hundred pages are somewhat uninspired (10 pages devoted to a program that exhaustively evaluates operations on all primitives, for example), but it picks up. And when it hits its stride it is comprehensive. Traditionally tricky areas of Java like the I/O classes and inner classes are well-covered, and the coverage of the new features in Java 5.0 are second to none, in particular annotations and generics, the latter going well beyond their use for type-safe containers, and actually making self-bounded types understandable. Nearly two hundred pages are devoted to the new threading and concurrency classes. If you really want to know what's going on with these core classes, this is the go-to book. The coverage of Swing is uninspiring, particularly as apart from a smattering of pseudo-UML class diagrams, there is only one illustration in the entire book (and it's 1400 pages long) - a picture of a Flash component, and it's a text box! However, there are plenty of other books out there that cover Swing in depth, so it's easy to overlook this. Personally, I didn't see the need for the introduction to Flash in a Java book, although the discussion of the SWT classes was useful. The other downside to the book is that the example code can be long. On the one hand, they have the advantage of being complete and runnable. On the other, it can be hard to spot the pertinent parts, and although the code is copiously commented, the Head First series of books have ably demonstrated the value of a more in-depth annotation, coupled more closely to the main text. Additionally, especially early on, the code examples are often dull and abstract, with method names like f(), which obfuscate rather than clarify. Later on, however, there are several witty and imaginative examples, so I can only assume that Bruce Eckel got a bit bored trying to make bitshifting entertaining. Finally, people new to Java and without a C background, could find the early references to how things are different in Java to C and C++ unnecessarily confusing, although one is assumed to have downloaded the flash-based 'Thinking in C' e-seminar from the author's website. These are minor disappointments, however, compared to the breadth and depth on offer here. You will need to be pretty expert at Java not to pick up any new tips on performance or idiomatic usage from the material here, and I will be using this as my first stop for reference purposes, particularly for the new Java 5.0 features. If you do any Java programming, this is well worth your money and pretty essential.  Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? (Report this)   7 of 7 people found the following review helpful: A great book, but..., 10 Jan 2003 By  "nepheles" - See all my reviews It judging this book, it is important to understand what this book is, and what it is not. Firstly, it is not an introduction to programming. I would reccommend that you are reasonably proficient in at least one other language before reading this book. Secondly, it does exactly what the title suggests: It leads you to think in Java - it does not give interesting or useful programs as examples - simply code which demonstrates (well) the concept being explained. Thirdly, it does not so much cover the practicalities of Java as the theory behind it. This book really requires the Sun Java Reference documentation to be used by the reader. So, understanding this, withing this context it is an excellent book. By the time you're finished, you will have a rock-solid base on which to build your Java knowledge.  Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? (Report this)   6 of 6 people found the following review helpful: A bit more special than other JAVA tutorials, 30 April 2003 By  Mr Daniel Clapson - See all my reviews This review is from: Thinking in Java (One-Off) (Paperback) If you search for Java books on Amazon you will notice that there are hundreds of Java tutorials available, and most of them will adequately teach you how to program in Java. Thinking in JAVA stands head and shoulders above the rest because it explains the why as well as the how . Once you understand why Java is structured like it is then you will have the edge over most other coders. Note: Although this book can be used as a reference guide, there are other books that are better suited to a quick dip style of reading; e.g. JAVA in a nutshell.  Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? (Report this) ›