Re: Book Recommendation

On 30 Sep 2005 06:02:03 -0700, "Gennady Vayl" <gevayl@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote or quoted :

>I am an engineer that will need to program in Java soon. I had Object
>Oriented C++ in high school and C in College. I need a book that would
>get me up to speed with Java. Give me some advice on what you people
>use...I know having a good book is VERY important.

see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/gettingstarted.html

For this I recommend going to a bookstore and browsing. You want a
book not too easy and not too hard. It has to fit YOU.

You might want one that teaches Java from a C++ perspective mainly
helping you UNLEARN your C++ expectations that really get in the way.
Java LOOKS superficially like C++, but under the hood they have almost
nothing in common.

My favourite books are ones with lots of code examples. I grasp code
far more easily than English exposition. Someone once teased me in an
introduction that I wrote my diary in FORTRAN.

Do the examples grab you? Towers of Hanoi or tick tack toe leave me
cold. Part of the job of the book is to motivate you. It does this
best if its examples are similar to what you ultimately want to do
with the language.


My website is crawling with book recommendations, with mini reviews
and links to bookstores that carry them. You might just sniff around
the particular topics you find of interest.

O'Reilly books you can't go wrong on. They are small, single topic and
usually well done. There are so many fluff books out there that tell
you stuff you could easily learn from free online docs -- just a
printed copy of the JavaDoc.

My personal favourite if I had to make do with only one book would be
Marty Hall's Core Web programming. It contains all kinds of useful
information about the sort of problems I wanted solve (basically
automating what browsers do, talking to browsers, understanding how
they work) that was not explained anywhere else. It has lots of code
too. See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/cgi.html for link.
--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Again taking new Java programming contracts.
.