Karanjit S. Siyan, Ph.D., James L. Weaver.
Copyright 1997.
Publisher: New Riders
912 pages

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Inside Java wastes little time talking about what Java is capable of doing. Instead it starts explaining how to write Java code after a brief introduction. It starts with very basic material and moves onto more advanced features. If you are familiar with C++, the first few chapters will be easy reading for you. The later chapters present more complex topics such as using the abstract window toolkit (AWT), exception handling, networking, Java Beans, remote method invocation, and JDBC.

Overall, I found this book is clearly written and it is a good way to get started if you are somewhat familiar with programming. Although the authors use lots of sample code to illustrate a concept, it would be helpful if they explained how the code works more thoroughly. Sometimes the authors present a code segment and then move right on without explaining what it does and how it does it.

If you already know what Java is and what it can do and want to start learning the language right away, this book is a good start. The information is current up to the beta version of the JDK 1.1.

Java Unleashed

Copyright 1996
Publisher: Sams net
958 pages

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Buy the profession reference edition

Unlike Inside Java, Java Unleashed spends many pages explaining what Java is and how it can be used. The first 150 pages is all introductory material. The book lists various resources such as accomplishments of other parties, the tools development tools, Java enabled browsers, etc. I did not think that all of this was necessary. If you decide to pick up a book on Java, chances are you already know about this type of information. The book first tries convince you that Java is worth learning before it starts to explain how to use the language. I found this totally unnecessary because I would not pick up the book in the first place if I felt Java was not worth learning.

After the authors finally started to explain how to use the language, their coverage of concepts was somewhat incomplete. For example, they only spend 1 page to explain how to use arrays. I found this completely inadequate. They did not explain simple, but common tasks such as how do you declare and allocate multidimensional arrays? How do you pass arrays to functions? How can a function return an array? I believe the book could not be thorough because it wasted too many pages on unnecessary introductory material.

I did find some helpful sections. I particularly liked the chapter on threads and multithreading and on security. Although this book was helpful, I believe you can find a better value elsewhere. This is one of the earlier books published on Java. I find that latter editions are generally better written. A 2^nd edition of this book has been published, but I have not had the opportunity to look at it yet.

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