The Java Tutorial

Second Edition

Review by Billy Barron

"The Java Tutorial Second Edition" by Campione & Walrath (Addison-Wesley; ISBNs 0-201-31007-4) is based on Sun's widely praised Java Tutorial found on the web. This edition of the book has been updated for Java 1.1.

This is one of the better books for learning Java. It's clear text and frequent examples make it an easy read. One of the benefits of this book over every other single one on the market is that having been available on the web and read by thousands of Java programmers, the authors have gotten an enormous amount of feedback about what sections were good and what sections were confusing. The confusing one have been improved. I doubt that any other Java book has gone under such testing by fire (except for possibly the specification manuals).

If you are learning Java, you can't go wrong with this book. Even if you have been using Java for a long time, you can probably find a few topics in this book that you are not that familiar with that will make this book worthwhile.