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Try to learn Java from the tutorials available online, and you encounter breezy references to unfamiliar concepts and examples so complicated you can’t tell the predefined Java classes from those the programmer has added. But if you make an investment and buy this book, a master teacher leads you by the hand.

The organization of the text seems odd at first. Why, for example, does Liang introduce a single GUI component, JOptionPane, at the beginning? It turns out he is showing you how to parse strings into other data types. Why does coverage of the String class intervene in the middle? It turns out to be a good example of an object, following up on the previous chapter. Every concept is presented in a logical progression.

Along the way, Liang makes excursions to topics like 2D arrays and Wrapper classes. I recently finished the brief version of this book and then needed to use a Swing feature, tables, which is covered only in the comprehensive version. So I had to rely on Sun’s tutorial, which is excellent but assumes you know the basics. It gives no explanation of the object type used to hold a table’s data — but Liang’s intro had prepared me to recognize and use a 2D array. My first attempt didn’t work. Closer review showed that booleans and integers should be surrounded with extra code — which, having read Liang, I knew were wrappers. That’s when I decided to continue on to this comprehensive version. Liang is that good, you’ll want all 1300 pages.

Throughout the book are beautifully designed examples, presenting exactly the code necessary to illustrate the target concepts and no more, and presented in full. If you’re new to OOP and unsure where to place certain code, you can use Liang’s examples as guides. Well thought-out reiview questions at the end of each chapter help consolidate what you’ve learned, and the exercises give you hands-on learning experience. These are particularly helpful in the early chapters — and fun; no other entertainment could beat the exercises on loops. The solutions are provided online for half of them, and you pick up new points by noting how Liang’s solution differs from yours.

The book’s layout is a paragon of clarity, with green text used to set off literal values and code. There are handy topic descriptions in the generous margins, which makes it easy to find what you’re looking for when you use the book for reference. The index is good. There are a few serious typos that can trip you up — i.e., the order of addition and subtraction is backwards in exercise 4.25, computing pi — but most of them are obvious (and, dear publisher, they ought to have been fixed by edition 8).

Supplemental materials are available online. The video notes are a bit of a snooze, but they may be valuable to those with a different learning style. They are walkthroughs of the examples in the text, presented in a calm, pleasant voice.

Pearson-Prentice Hall has, however, made two lamentable decisions. One is to offer no hardback edition — this is a reference book that is destined for heavy use and doomed to cellotape repairs as a flimsy paperback. The other is to publish brief versus complete editions, when what is needed is two separate tomes for first half and second half.
Rating: 5 / 5