A good java book

[ticebain]

I am pretty decent in php and want to get into java, my budget is tight and I am looking more toward older java books because of their price. But many older books are for java 5, is there anything that a complete java novice is going to miss if he starts with a java 5 book versus a java 6?

also some good suggestions of books that start at the absolute beginning would be welcome

Thanks

[ruby-lang]

Absolutely nothing at all. The changes from Java 5 to 6 were minor from a programmer's standpoint, a few extra libraries mostly, since they concentrated their work on under the hood improvements.

I recommend the Head First series. I found Head First Servlet & JSP specially good, but you will need a general introduction to Java first.

[ticebain]

thanks for the advice, I went with 'learning java' by o'reilly, Ive had good luck with their php books and their 'learning php' allowed me to make a cms when I was done with it so hopefully this java book is just as illuminating

[ruby-lang]

Sun has very extensive online tutorials on Java with plenty of examples. Make sure you check them.

[burNMind]

Deitel's books are also very good for Java.

PS: The book's name is "Java How to Program", sorry but i can't post a link yet!

[krzyk]

A good general introduction to java is Head First Java (where the whole Head First series started).
Other also recommend Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel, but I prefer the HF one.

Thinking in Java 3rd edition is available for download from author site: http://www.mindview.net/Books/TIJ/ (AFAIR for Java 1.4)

And the 4th edition has 7 first chapters available on http://www.mindview.net/Books/TIJ4/ (this one is for Java 1.5 and 1.6)

[reboltutorial]

I am pretty decent in php and want to get into java, my budget is tight and I am looking more toward older java books because of their price. But many older books are for java 5, is there anything that a complete java novice is going to miss if he starts with a java 5 book versus a java 6?

also some good suggestions of books that start at the absolute beginning would be welcome

Thanks

If your budget is tight it's better to keep your money for book that contains information you can't find on the net. For just learning java there are a lot of good materials on the net like this one :
http://www.javabeginner.com/toc.htm

[Chef2Dine4]

I know it's a little off topic, but if you're going to move in to servlets I can thoroughly recommend the Core Servlets books - they've helped me loads.

Btw, I'm going to go for the Head First book, seems to get good reviews everywhere.

[manwithshades]

I used to use a Java book by Dietel & Dietel. It helped me because it was simple, light and it had a lot of examples.

[jennygel17]

there are lots of resources in the internet. forgot the sites for it though.

[krzyk]

There is nothing better than a good book, you can read it anywhere (waiting in queue, riding on the bus, etc)

[darkslayer]

Deitel - how to program

Then you just download the java 6 se sdk(jdk), and eclipse, and you are good to go. Plain java/swing java is easy in eclipse.

[crmalibu]

I just started reading Java how to program. Excellent so far, although this is my first programming book.