java

I'm disappointed with many of the low rated comments, this book is not for beginners, its an intermediate to advanced text. When you read the description it states: "Most of this new edition has the more experienced reader in mind".

I started out with this book in college, it was assigned reading and I hated it, I had to read each page twice. But as I got more proficient with java and wanted to learn all the fine points, I couldn't find another book out there that delves into the core of the language as well as this book does. Most java books out there spend half the book discussing swing and the api classes, but this book discusses the language itself. If you're a software engineer especially, the most difficultly you'll have is debugging complicated code, you'll need to have a good understanding of how java works under the hood.

This book was invaluable to me at work, because I didn't really understand why certain variables weren't getting updated, until I read that unless you specify them as volatile, a class will keep a cached copy of them. I had problems with the order of initialization of certain variables in a subclass, and then I read that top most super class gets instantiated first, then its subclass, on down the line, fields first, then the constructor guts.

You can assume that any book written by the creator(s) of a language wont be introductory, but will give you an in depth look at the finer points of the language that other, more cursory books, gloss over.

If you are already a developer and wanted to learn Java then this is the book for you. This book clearly explains the language its nuances (this book is not verbose). The examples used by authors to demonstrate the concepts are excellent. I programmed a lot in C/C++ and the books I used to learn those languages are "The C Programming Language" and "The C++ Programming Language" respectively. Ironically, when I started learning Java I did not take up this book. Instead I tried several books and there are some good books out there but nothing that suited me well. I prefer "to the point" discussion that this book provides when learning a language and also like to know why a certain feature was included in the language. This book did exactly that. But if you are new to programming, then this book may not be for you.

Other books that you may like to take a look at are:

1) Thinking in Java. This is available on the for Free(But its too verbose for my tastes).

2) Taming java threads( By Allan Holub. A very nice discussion of Java Threads and Caveats)

This is the best book by far to explain Java itself, concise and clear cut, but don't expect to get much out of it if you haven't done any Java coding or are just getting started. After you code Java seriously for a while, you'll find this book beautiful.