Hi Friends,
As a beginner, to learn java everyone first preference is to use Balagurusamy author book. It helps to understand the java programming language in an easy way.
In this book, we can use it for theoretical exam point of view and the basic thing to learn java is we must clear about the oops concept. These concepts are very clearly explained in this book.
In many colleges, the lectures also following this books to help for students to getting high scores in their exams. And the students can easily go through that concepts.
Apart from computer science department, the other department students can easy to understand the programming language and the explanation given in these books as step by step process.