little_cat said:
Can you recommend some good books that show how to exploit the strong
features of Java, rather than bombard me with a bunch of syntactic
rules and libraries (that's what "The ANSI C Programming Language" and
"The C++ Programming Language" have done successfully)? Thanks in
advance.
_Learning Java_ by O'Reilly is pretty good. It is an introductory book,
so it doesn't cover things in a lot of depth. But what it does cover it
generally tries to go beyond the simplest approach and give some hints
how best to use it.
For example, it has one of the better explanations of generics I've
seen. When it talks about Swing, it goes into some of the history of
AWT first, explaining why things are the way they are. It also shows
the correct way to set up most of the important Swing classes, not just
merely calling "new" on the default constructor.
However, if you're beyond that, then the Sun tutorial is good. Sun's
"tutorial" really isn't much of a tutorial, but it is a great repository
of examples of how to use nearly every class in the API. (Or, at least
a great many of the important, common classes.) If you can write Java
code fine, understand the syntax, and you can usually read the APIs in
the Java docs, then the tutorial is a great bridge when the Java doc
doesn't make intuitive sense.
For those truly in need of hand-holding, the Java Passion website has
free online classes in a large variety of Java subjects, including basic
programming. It's run by a Sun researcher, Sang Shin, and it's really a
good resource for getting started in a large variety of Java programming
subjects.
http://javapassion.com/