Customer Rating: 
Summary: Serious Developers Look Elsewhere
Comment: This book is best used as a tutorial of the J++ development environment. If you're looking for which toolbar contains which command, you might be pleased with this purchase. As a reference of the JAVA language, this text falls short. The first (and possibly the worst) grievance is that the book is full of errors. Granted, most of them are in the text and can be glanced over, but some are in tables of the language keywords and operators. If you're a C++ developer you will probably not like this text. It just doesn't contain enough "meat" to be used as a reference book. Also, don't expect to grasp any OO concepts. The author uses all the buzzwords but never goes beyond to actually demonstrate them. If you're a C++ developer who is familiar with the OO paradigm, don't expect to find a description of the the JAVA object-model here. The author shows several examples but never explains them thoroughly enough for the targeted audience. To summarize, this book lives up to the 'fast' part of the title. Ultimately though, the book is too brief to be worth a read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Close but no banana
Comment: This book really seems to be amongst the many aimed at c++ programmers transferring to Java. I'm not sure why it has the introduction to OO section, if you don't understand that already, you won't get through the book.It introduces a concept one sentence and in the next leaps into a full demonstration of it, without really explaining what the concept is. I'm not a lazy reader who expect stuff handed to him on a silver platter, but there just simply isn't enough information in this book to extract what you need.
It's ok in parts, but just moves too quickly, it skips over huge sections, including some fundamental concepts.
I'm off to find another Java book to buy.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Straight to the point.
Comment: This is a pretty good book. Not for absolute beginners, but if you have done a bit of scripting you should be ok. It moves pretty fast, but not too fast. If you like you hand held, don't read it, if you like to get to the meat without the waffle, go for it. Sometimes a little confusing, but not often.The main reason for the missing star is the books binding!!! It's a struggle to keep this book open - don't the publishers realise people type while reading these books? I've had to come up with all sorts of inventive ways to keep it open while being able to read the parts while I code examples. Take a lesson from O'Reilly books, wonderfully bound and just flop open. I know it seem nit picky, but I find it a real nuisance.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Java book
Comment: John Cowell has written a fantastic book on J++. As a new java programmer I had been struggling with some of the concepts of java and OO programming. Cowell's book contains, in my opinion, the best description of object oriented programming that I have ever read. I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking to learn J++ or just java in general.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Finally a book that works!
Comment: I tried several other books and about gave up on J++. Then I got this book and everything clicked! No fancy jargon. Just straight forward explanations, clear examples, diagrams that explain what the J++ environment is doing and what 'buttons' to push to make it run.And one of the best explanations of Object Oriented Programming I've seen. I've taken college courses in OOP, but never felt that comfortable with it until now.
It's not fancy, it doesn't toss in a bunch of 'computer-eze', but this book does what it says: It gets you to the point of being able to write J++ very quickly.
