Review by Billy Barron, Delphi Consultants

"The Java Programming Language Third Edition" (Addison-Wesley; ISBN 0-201-70433-1) by Arnold, Gosling, and Holmes is the third edition of this popular book. David Holmes is a new author added to this book. I suspect that he did the bulk of the work on this edition.

The changes for the third edition are many of the newer features of the language such as strictfp, collections, and reference objects. Also, much of this edition has also been restructured for easier reading.

Since I have previously read this book in detail, I decided to this time just looking at the newer material. The quality of the new material matches the quality of the older material. I found the explanation of strictfp in this book to be very clear whereas the language specification explanation confused me. The discussion on references is also pretty good.

In closing, this edition is a good update to the excellent existing book. However, if you own the second edition, probably not enough has changed in this version to warrant buying a new copy.