If you look at the Top 50 Books on Google in the Computers you’re almost certain to find a ’’Head First Book’’ up there. Like most books, they bounce around in the rankings, but if you’ve ever gone through a ’’Head First Book’’, you know that they deserve that high ranking for one reason alone: ’’Head First’’ tosses the dry, technical learning book that we all suffered through in programming class—and occasionally still suffer through—and replaces it with something that’s, well, just a heck of a lot of fun.
There are a wide variety of books on learning Java. Arguably—and trust me, I will argue—the best thing about this book are the figures. Almost every page comes with a number of great visual metaphors to help you not only learn Java, but recall it later with eccentric fits of random laughter. Want a great reminder of how serialization and deserialization works? Go no further than the table of contents for Chapter 14, where an inflated rubber-frog intertube (deserialized) is pasted next to itself completely deflated, looking like the life has been sucked right out of it (serialized). Want to know why inheritance isn’t always a good thing? Try asking the ’’doctor’’ on page 169, who inherited his knowledge so he didn’t have to go to medical school. Passing by copy instead of value? Let the depressed office worker making multiple photocopies of his face help you remember which is which.
There’s plenty of J2SE 5.0 material in this edition as well. For example, number formatting—familiar to anyone who has programmed using the old printf() functions in C—gets due coverage in Chapter 10. The enhanced for loop gets some text on page 105, and the all important generics (in this case, with the Collections framework) gets a thorough treatment in Chapter 16. Even the Java language itself on page 4 has morphed from a turtle (Java 1.0.2) ten years ago to Lassie, to a proud horse (1.3), and then to some sort of ’’Iron Giant’’ Mech warrior with Java 5.0.
Another nice thing about Head First Java, 2nd Edition is that it whets the appetite for more. With later coverage of more advanced topics such as Swing and RMI, you just can’t wait to dive into those APIs and code that flawless, 100000-line program on java.net that will bring you fame and venture-capital fortune. There’s also a great deal of material, and even some best practices, on networking and threads
I think you really should go to the bookstore and thumb through Head First Java, 2nd Edition. Even if you already know Java, you may pick up a thing or two. And if not, just going through the pages is a great deal of fun.