ISBN9780132221580

This is an excellent text. It goes into great detail for an "introduction". The excercises at the end of the chapters are very well designed using everything you've learned up to that point and re-writing old excercises more efficiently using the new topics learned. His website also has alot of additional information. Head First Java is a good overview, while this text digs down to the details. Very good author and very good text. Highly recommended. One note though, this is a very long text with alot of information so if you plan of reading the entire book and doing all the excercises you will need to invest a large amount of time to do so. But if you do invest the time you will have a very good grasp of the Java language. I usually always say that there's never a "one-book catchall", but this comes pretty close. I feel that by reading this book, doing all the excercises, and making sure that you fully understand the topics, you can adequately program Java in a work environment.

I highly recommend the Deitel Java: How to Program book instead.

Liang over and over again introduces terms that he has never defined. He does not tell you why code is the way it is. He is terse, and there is just no true explanation.

The layout of the text is also in black and green, and that's it. His code is hard to follow compared to the Deitel book.

I'm truly shocked at how people seem to like this book. It's unintelligible in my view. I dread reading it and actually read the Deitel book instead.

I bought this book motivated by the good reviews that i saw on amazon. I was very pleased not only with the wealth of information(Fundamentals, OOP, MVC, JDBC, JSP/Servlets, JavaBeans, Swing/Advanced Swing, Collections etc ), but also from the presantation which is consice and very easy to follow. This was the text that did it for me. I struggled with other texts and the presentation was always missing something to say the least. Thanks to this book i was able to move to the world of J2EE and my biggest problem was dealing with application servers than with the java language itself.
My current position demands some C# .Net development and once again i am struggling with horrible incomplete Books that neglect to provide the hole code assuming previous knowledge.
I thought that may be Liang has written something about C# (Unfortunatelly not), but i was sad to see that there is
some critism which i consider unfair -not so much for the author but -for those who are trying to learn java.
I dont Know how to strech this more but listen: There is no better intro
book in programming. May be an experienced teacher has objections about the right positioning of the chapters but believe it or not after reading the first 7 chapters you are able to skip to any chapter you want(At the beginning of the book there is a flow chart that helps you guide your study according to your needs). Also dont forget that it is a programming book which tries to teach tough theoritical ideas in a practical way and dont fool yourself that there is a
way for doing this without your ability to understand.
Finally i saw that someone suggests a well-Known book instead of Liangs. I already own that book and its really confusing . A ton of information mixing together without making a specific point. If you dont beleive me just check the review for the book.

This book has an extremely dry writing style and often does not explain things well to a beginner. Additionally, the book is very "fat" and heavy especially when carrying it around or to class.

Got this book for an object oriented programming class. I have had very little programming experience, but the book has helped greatly in both learning Java and learning some of the fundamentals of coding.