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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description

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!