Hey! I'm pretty new to programming, and since I'm a little too young to join any sort of course, decided to self-teach myself, and decided to start off OO programming through Java, seeing as I'll be picking up Computer Science next year as a subject, and it has quite some Java involved. I never really considered learning Java (I hate how resource hungry some java programs can be ) but now I might pick up a good book to give myself a head start in Java. I'm not looking for a small introductory guide, and neither am I a complete novice, I got some experience with C and PHP, but nothing too big, especially on PHP, so a nice comprehensive book would do the job well. I did some searching around and found two books that seem to explain everything extremely well, and also give you exercises to work on (Which is one of the main things I am looking for, since I'm self teaching myself); Big Java by Horstmann and Java How to Program by Deitel.

Now I've read that Big Java was more well suited for use in class, but seems that it comes with tons of exercises and an interesting random fact is thrown in every now and then, which is all good. And Deitel's book also comes with tons of exercises, and mainly focuses on Java, and is also bigger and from the looks of the insides, more complete.

So was wondering if anyone here has any experiences with any of the two books, would really appreciate any suggestions on which one to take And if your gonna post something about Head First Java, yes I have taken a look at it, and although I must have to admit, it looks like a great book, it's not really my taste...

Thanks! (Just realized how long of a post this is, sorry xD)

>I hate how resource hungry some java programs can be
Thats the thing from the Ice age. Now Java can really be as fast and efficient as some of the native language code.

>I did some searching around and found two books
Hmmm... Did you not search the sticky thread at the start of the forum ? It lists some good books for Java too and they really are worth.

I personally haven't read any of the books mentioned, I haven't even heard the name of Big Java before, I found Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java quite good.

Absolute Java is a good beginner's book. It covers the concepts with simplicity and clarity, and goes in depth enough that you can explore the concepts further on your own without too much trouble.

I personally recommend Head First Java.

I'm currently learning from a book called Data Structures Using Java 5.0 by Nicholas J. DeLillo. It's a great book with lots of great examples.

^ Thats a beginner's book? Sounds like an advanced book to me.

Sounds like an introductory book to me. It's not an introduction to Java, though -- it's an introduction to data structures.

Making it an advanced book from the perspective of someone who is just learning Java.

I found the best book to be google and the best tutorials to be whatever the mind can conceptualize into the digital world.

I have been writing software since the 6th grade (C++ and Java more recently) and I must say I learned the most when I took every day computing tasks and wrote applications to solve the problems.

Java is a very neat language in that you can very easily get up and running with it given you've got the time and patience to do so (almost contradictory I know haha )

Given a good compiler (NetBeans or Eclipse) you can begin serving JSP and servlet based applications almost immediately and can go spiraling up from there.

So to make a long bloated story short, find something you like to do on your computer or something you find boring enough - and write a solution to it.

I started with files manipulation: moving files, searching for content, manipulating contents...etc and progressed from there. I've since dived into servlet applications, image meta data manipulation, service bus implementations, student loan calculators, database administration applications, multi-threaded apps, web sniffers / harvesters...etc

You never know where the fingers will take you

>I found the best book to be google
Yes but sometimes you need a flow to what you are reading which is hard to get given the fact that you are looking up different articles written by different authors scattered all over the internet.
Also when you read different articles by different authors you would sometimes find them contradicting each other a bit, because every author has hos own style, his beliefs his own "best practices" etc,
I am not saying that this isn't a good way, yes it is, but for a beginner not a preferred way to begin with.

>Given a good compiler (NetBeans or Eclipse)
These are IDEs.