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Thinking In Java 3rd Edition Available Online

Posted by timothy on from the free-books dept.

slothdog writes "Bruce Eckel has made the new 3rd edition of Thinking in Java (and other books) available online. This is a more introductory-level book, although there is a work in progress on Thinking in Patterns and one on the way entitled Thinking in Enterprise Java. All in all, an excellent book for someone not yet familiar with Java. Kudos to Bruce for making it available for download!"

2 of 28 comments (clear)

  1. Re:3 or 4 years ago... by bay43270 · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is a great book for those who already have a background in C or C++ and anyone who already knows Java and wants to understand the language and it's history a bit better. It's easy to read and explains more about how to wrap your mind around Java than how to program in it.

    For this reason I DO NOT recommend this book to beginning programmers, programmers transitioning from COBOL and 4th gen languages or anyone who wants to start writing Java tomorrow. This is a book about understanding Java... it's not good for those who want to learn syntax or jump in to their first program.

    Our company was making a transition from an old character based system to a Swing/J2EE system. I made the mistake of suggesting this book for use in the classroom. Our programmers were simply too impatient for it. All of our advanced programmers loved it and recommend it, but those who just wanted to join the project quickly (most of them, in our case) preferred Sun's Java Tutorial series.

  2. Re:3 or 4 years ago... by John+Harrison · · Score: 5, Informative
    Two years ago I was a consultant at a company porting a Vax based system to Java. Many of their developers were new to Java and needed constant hand-holding.

    After a few weeks of this I made a CD with the JavaDocs and Thinking in Java v2 on it. When they came with a question I would give them the CD and told them to copy it onto their computer. I showed them what the JavaDocs were useful for and showed them how Thinking in Java not only had great examples but explained the hows and whys of the language. This helped them understand how what they were doing made sense in a deeper way than if they had just read the example code.

    The book was a big hit. It saved me a ton of time having to explain things and helped those guys become better programmers.

    That said, v2 was much better than the beta version that I cut my teeth on way back when. Since it wasn't available in printed form at the time the professor made everbody buy a version she had printed out. Too bad she had repaginated it such that the page numbers in the index no longer mapped to the pages in the book.

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