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Thinking in Java (4th Edition) (平装)
by Bruce Eckel
| Category:
Java language, Software development, IT, Technology |
| Market price: ¥ 588.00
MSL price:
¥ 578.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
A book that has many awards and raves from programmers worldwide for its extraordinary clarity, careful organization, and real life examples. |
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AllReviews |
  1 2 Total 2 pages 16 items |
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Daniel Bigelow (MSL quote), Switzerland
<2007-01-10 00:00>
This is not a book you can simply read. Mr. Eckel's formal academic training in physics and engineering is reflected in the character of this book and you must be prepared to approach it as a serious study and programming project at the university level of rigor. You will need lots of time if you want to "graduate". The book is very code intensive. If you don't have access to a Java development environment to step through the code examples, examine variables and methods, the state of threads, and work through the exercises then I would not recommend this book to you. The book is actually the course material for a student-oriented computer lab environment and attempting to absorb the contents of this book by reading alone would be an extremely difficult experience indeed. |
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Jeff (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
I felt obligated to write this review about Think in Java 3/e in the hope that it might help someone else to make an informed decision that's looking for what I thought is an excellent book on a very complex subject (really a masterpiece). The style in which Bruce discusses the content is most relaxing while at the same time being in-depth coverage on complex subject matter. His style reflects his ability to get people through complex subject matter where they might otherwise skim through the subject lightly or even skip over it entirely. Think in Java 3/e is a must read and a must have as part of any reference library. After you get into the book you'll see why the book has received so many awards (Think in Java 1/e and Think in Java 2/e also). Bruce is a master when it comes to teaching and explaining complex subjects and we're very lucky that he has that same ability to put it down on paper. |
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Sunny Menon (MSL quote), Canada
<2007-01-10 00:00>
A lot of people want to find a shortcut to learning Java. With the popularity of Java, a lot of "misconceptions" about Programming have come into existence (And they have been well exploited by "Technical writers" and leading "Dr/Professors". I never buy a book that says written by "DR Know it all" because I think that their brain cells are dead and their writing makes sense to them and only them). I am writing all this because I spent too much time and money trying to learn Java beyond the basics using "ShakesPear" style books. In my opinion "newbies" should learn a programming language like C because it is small and you get the "Feel" for programming. OOP is nothing more than concepts.If you have no programming experience, this book is not for you. This is one of the best books written on Java (Other being Just Java by Peter Linden). The examples are short where they need to be and the text is written in "Simple English". It tells you about the nuts and bolts of Java Language. I'll say that it is a book for "Java Novices" and I use this and Just Java books as reference. |
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Joseph Cohen (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
This is NOT a beginner's book. The sheer size of this weighty tome is overwhelming, and it does not come with rollers. It is a great book for your second pass thru Java, certainly more so than any other book that I've looked at. I have extensive teaching experience and I do spend lots of time examing books. Eckel is a very readable and much more than competent writer as attested to by the great sucess with his previous C and C++ books. They are still great reading and studying books. For Java starters, you can't do much better than the Sierra and Bates book, 'HeadFirst Java' from O'Reilly. (By the way, at good price from Amazon). Check out their newest, Design Patterns in Java. Everything in the 4th edition of this now classic Eckel book looks more polished. In agreement with other reviewers, this book lacks a polished publishing job. Where are the pictures ? A little UML might be nice. Can we get a nicer font and less huge margins. |
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Zivkovic (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
In my opinion this is the best Java book for beginners out there. The material is easy to understand and chronologically divided. Each chapter is full of excellent samples (that actually work.) You will learn concepts of OOP and how Java fits in it. Bruce explains object, class, inheritance, polymorphism, etc, and everything is followed by great examples.
Bruce was right on target by making an electronic version of the book available for free download. That way he has gathered enormous feedback before even publishing the book. Check his website for other interesting books, free downloads and seminars. |
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C. Johnson (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
As I already said reading few the first few chapters kept me interested and more importantly, I finally felt that I was learning something. The author uses pretty good examples and also more importantly, all of his code compiles and runs properly, which is more than I can say for other JAVA and other programming books in general that are rushed to the market. This book has clearly gone through serious proof reading before publishing which makes reading and studying the code much less frustrating. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to see a code snippet in a book only to compile it and it have snytax and Runtime errors all over the place. I have not run into this problem with this book so far. The only thing you have to do to some of the code is change the packages to match your own directory structure or better yet just use his verbatim.
Now for my dislikes. While this book seems to be very throrough, it can lead to VERY LOOOOONG chapters. I am still on Chapter 11: Collections of Objects, and this is my 5th day on the same chapter. Working anywhere from 8 - 10 hours / day, I don't have the time do a chapter a day. When I first started this book I usually did a chapter with the excersises in a couple of days, now its more like a week. One good thing about viewing this in a web browser is that there are no page numbers. If I actually saw how many pages some of these chapters were in the book version I would be overwhelmed. Even still the length of some of the chapters cause them to become boring and you may find yourself just wanting to rush through the last parts just so you can be done. Whenever I feel myself getting like this, I take a break and come back to it later. This forces me to to not "rush" through. I have to do this becuase I am not trying to "zoom" through the book, I am taking my time and asorbing what the author is trying to teach. I even started compiling and running his examples and actually going through each line of code to see what he's doing. This is a must in some of the later chapters because there is some subtle code that you may miss if you just read it in the book. This is not one of those "Learn x in 1 day" books. This will take time but in the end I think I will be satisfied. I think this book would also make a good reference book if you forget how to do something due to the abundance of information.
Of course both versions are perfectly fine, but it just comes down to a readability issue and what you are used to. It may not seem like a big deal to begin with, but once the programs get more complicated, if you are used to my or one of your own styles his code will become very hard to read. I ended up copying his code into Notepad and placing the braces as I am used to so I can more easily read the code.
His writting is also very hard to read at times. He frequently uses parenthesis to explain something else while he's still trying to explain what he was originally talking about. His overuse of parenthesis can throw you off your original thought if you are not careful.
Examples:
"As expected, arrays are faster than any container for random-access lookups and iteration. You can see that random accesses (get( )) are cheap for ArrayLists and expensive for LinkedLists. (Oddly, iteration is faster for a LinkedList than an ArrayList, which is a bit counterintuitive.) On the other hand, …"
"You need to build only one container, and any Java object will go into that container. (Except for primitives, which can be placed in containers as constants using the Java primitive wrapper classes, or as changeable values by wrapping in your own class.) This is the second place where an array is superior to the generic containers: When you create an array, you create it to hold a specific type (which is related to the third factor - an array can hold primitives, whereas a container cannot). This means that you get compile-time..."
A final complaint is that he occassionally throws in some things in is sample code that he has not gone over yet. Many times he explains what he does AFTER the code, but sometimes you are left wondering what the heck he just did, hoping that it would be covered in the next section or a later chapter.
In summary this is a good book for me so far. It can be time consuming, frustrating and boring in some places, but I think the author does a good job in teaching you. As others have said this book is not for beginners and definetely not for someone who has no Object Oriented exposure with any language. This is my second time "learning" JAVA and I am getting through it probably because I was already at least familiar with many of the things he teaches. If this was my first run through it, I probably would be having a much, much harder time. This book is doing a much better job than those watered down "Learn JAVA in 2 hours!" books. |
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