Java, the Complete Reference, 8th Edition has been updated according to changes in Java 7. For those not willing to read the whole review, I will say my conclusion is, be you a beginner or an expert Java developer, you need to read this book.
This book is an in-depth guide to the Java language. A very large portion of the core Java APIs are discussed comprehensively. The book has four parts, plus appendix and index.
PART 1: The Java Language
This part has 14 chapters and comprises discussions ranging from the simplest to the fairly complex. It starts with a history of Java and ends with a discussion on Generics, touching topics like Annotations, IO, Threading and Exceptions along the way. I particularly like the part that talks about C programming language, extolling the virtues of the language. Of course no Java book is complete without talking about OOP (Object oriented Programming) and chapter 2 of part 1 did justice to this. One good thing for beginners is that you start writing code straight from chapter 2. If you are an experienced programmer, you can safely skip to chapter 10. Although I recommend reading everything.
Chapter 1: The Introduction and Evolution of Java
Chapter: 2: An Overview of Java
Chapter: 3: Data Types, Variables and Arrays
Chapter: 4: Operators
Chapter: 5: Control Statements
Chapter: 6: Introducing Classes
Chapter: 7: A closer look at methods and classes
Chapter: 8: Inheritance
Chapter: 9: Packages and Interfaces
Chapter: 10: Exception Handling
Chapter: 11: Multithreaded Programming
Chapter 12: Enumerations, Autoboxing, and Annotations (metadata)
Chapter 13: I/O, Applets and Other topics
Chapter 14: Generics
PART 2: The Java Library
This part also has 14 chapters, taking the chapters count to 28. Here the book discusses the core Java Library; which includes Strings, NIO, Networking, java.util package, AWT, concurrency and Regular Expressions. This is the chapter for you if you are an experienced developer. Here, the book discusses the new Java 7 Features and more. I’ll advice beginners to read the Part 1 at least twice before diving into Part 2.
Chapter 15: String Handling
Chapter: 16: Exploring java.lang
Chapter: 17: java.util Part 1: The collections framework
Chapter: 18: java.util Part 2: More Utility Classes
Chapter: 19: Input/Output: Exploring java.io
Chapter: 20: Exploring NIO
Chapter: 21: Networking
Chapter: 22: The Applet Class
Chapter: 23: Event Handling
Chapter: 24: Introducing the AWT: Working with Windows, Graphics and Text
Chapter: 25: Using AWT Controls: Layout Managers and Menus
Chapter 26: Images
Chapter 27: The Concurrent Utilities
Chapter 28: Regular Expressions and Other Packages
PART 3: Software Development Using Java
This part discusses some really very import ant Java concepts. It contains just 4 fully packed chapters, recommended for both beginners and experts alike
Chapter 29: Java Beans
Chapter 30: Introducing Swing
Chapter 31: Exploring Swing
Chapter 32: Servlets
PART 4: Applying Java
In this part, we have two chapters. Each chapter picks a real world Java application. describes and implemented it. A note to beginners here, because of the volume of code you will be required to type, you might want to do copy-and-paste, but I strongly recommended against that. Doing the typing will definitely help you in more ways than one. This chapter concludes this book, bringing the number of chapters to 34.
Chapter 33: Financial Applets and Servlets
Chapter 34: Creating a download manager in Java
Appendix and Index.
In the appendix, javadoc is discussed. I particularly like and recommend this part to all. Documenting code is very important and should be embraced by all.
In summary, this is a good book, read it, study it, use it as a reference, whatever you decided to do with this book, you will find out it is more than equal to the task.
Great thanks to Faltermeier Bettina for providing me the preview copy.
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