THIS is how I finally learned Java. It took me a while, partially due to lack of motivation, partially due to reading the wrong books. This book however I would recommend to anyone wanting to learn Java. It does not use my least favorite method of teaching a language (building a single application trying to force in every programming concept, class, and method), instead they use small examples focusing on the topic at hand. This book also does not focus exclusively on GUI or web programming, although it does cover both. I personally prefer when computer books to not assume they know WHY you want to learn the language, and just teach it to you.

This is a simply excellent book covering exactly what I want to use Java for. I know I am in the minority having no interest at all in Swing (or GUI programming in general) but network programming….I am all about that.

In addition to the great explications and references for the various TCPIP and higher level protocol classes, there is also a bit of useful SSL and security info. And it covers Java 5

This is a good, useful, if a bit short intro and guide to the Perl language. Rather than try to teach you how to write one application using every concept it wants to teach, it presents them all separately (although sometimes building on each other) which is the style I prefer. My only gripe is I would have preferred a LOT more regular expression focus because, well that is what most people use Perl primarily for anyway.

This was a helpful book to learn PHP with. It focused primarily on Wed programming (which is appropriate) and even threw in some database interfacing and XML stuff for good measure. While intended as a beginner’s guide, I found this book organized enough and complete enough to use as a reference when I need one. The complete function appendix at the end is a nice touch as well, I wish more “intro” language books did the same.

I had several false starts when trying to learn Java. Unfortunately this book was one of them. I have never been a fan of language books that attempt to teach you the language by picking some random application and having you slowly write it throughout the book. The reason is because (1) if you don’t like the program, it make it hard to stay motivated and (2) no one program really acts as a good example for every library, function, class, technique, etc that the book is trying to teach you, so it always seems really forced in places.

In this case the sole purpose of this book is to build a “windows paintbrush” clone program in Java. Now I am firmly of the opinion that world does not need another bad drawing program, and certainly not one that saves everything in an XML format (good God, yuck). Not until O’rielly’s Learning Java book did I find what I was looking for and actually learned Java well enough to use it.

This book will likely appeal to those primarily wishing to use Java to build GUIs. As I have never enjoyed building GUIs in any language, nor to I plan to in the future, this book was not for me.

Despite being a huge fan of the “For Dummies” series (for obvious reasons), I only own a few of them. This was one of the first computer books I bought “back in the day” as it were, and to be honest I never really enjoyed it. Perhaps it was because I was trying to learn C++ without first learning C (which I eventually did), or perhaps because I simply never liked the language all that much once I did eventually learn it for programming classes in college. I guess after mastering C and learning Java, I had no use for C++, leading me to come to the conclusion that C++ really is “For Dummies”.

This book was a bit of a disappointment to me. It covered the standard C library pretty well I guess, but it seems it was mostly devoted to detailing the history and philosophy of various functions and the rational being how to use them (or not use them, as the case may be). While I am probably one of the few people I know who are actually interested in that, I was more hoping for just a quick and dirty reference book. As it stands, I tend to use the appendix from the K&R C book more for this purpose.

This is IT. This is THE C book. The only one you really need

Few books travel with me wherever I go for as long as this one did. I carried this everywhere for about 4 years, and I STILL keep it close by if I need it for any reference. Aside from the being the definitive source of C information, it also has some quick explanations and syntax guides to most of the standard library in the back.

This was a good tutorial to Python. I needed to get up to speed on this language quickly in my old job to port some Python code we got from a mainframe software company to C. This allowed me to understand the language enough to do so. However I have not done much development in Python since then so I cannot speak to how well this book prepares you for that.