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Java Programming IT Technology

Seeking a Solid Java Textbook? 93

Posted by Cliff from the introductory-classes-for-MS-students dept.
StudMuffin asks: "I am teaching a Master's level Introductory Java Programming class, at the University of Michigan in January, and am on the hunt for a solid Java textbook. This class is aimed at grad students (who obviously have a bachelors degree, so they are assumed to be able to think on their own) with no programming experience. Specifically, I would like to ground them in good Object Oriented principles, solid program design techniques, and finally in the actual syntax of Java. I would rather think of this as a 'How to program well' class that happens to use Java as the language over a 'Java class' that happens to cover programming. I would like to stay away from the applet heavy books that I tend to find, focusing instead on the topics above. Any ideas?"
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Seeking a Solid Java Textbook? More

Seeking a Solid Java Textbook?

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  • Oxymorons (Score:5, Funny)

    by acxr is wasted ( 653126 ) * on Friday September 05, 2003 @11:55PM (#6885471)
    I never thought I'd hear the phrase "Master's level Introductory."
    • Have you ever seen a good textbook without "introductory" or "introduction to" in the title? Basically, in academic subjects, if it isn't "introductory", it's research. Anything that's been solved before is "trivial".
    • It's probably for Business students; if they 'learn java' they'll be able to manage the entire programming/IT division.
    • especially from a StudMuffin.

  • I was there 2 years ago... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Artie_Effim ( 700781 ) on Saturday September 06, 2003 @12:00AM (#6885490)
    and while I cannot single out a textbook for you, I urge you to spend 3 classes on UML. Understanding an object and it's methods really helped me, the language was secondary to that; hell, I just used the API ;).

  • Thinking in Java (Score:5, Informative)

    by skaffen42 ( 579313 ) on Saturday September 06, 2003 @12:03AM (#6885503)
    Check out Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java [mindview.net]. Not really a textbook in the classic sense, but sounds like what you need. Also available in an HTML version.

    • Re:Thinking in Java (Score:4, Informative)

      by EllF ( 205050 ) on Saturday September 06, 2003 @12:14AM (#6885531) Homepage
      Backing this up. Thinking in Java, available online, is the single best textbook for learning Java in existence. I'd *highly* reccomend getting the bound version, but look into the online edition to see if it meets your needs if you're reluctant to drop the dough.
      • I agree with you, though the question did not seem to be to learn everything about Java, but to learn to OOP programming in a good way.

        Maybe a book more directly focused on OOP, datastructures or programming practises would be a better choice. Preferrably accompanied by a Java textbook of the kind that Eckel provides.

        • I actually learned most of my OOP theory from Eckel, which is why I suggested it over a pure reference. I wouldn't reach for his C++ book if I just wanted to know what parameters a function took, but I would if I wanted a solid read on how classes interrelate with each other.

          Was your experience with his texts, at least in terms of his OOP instruction, somehow different?

    • Re:Thinking in Java (Score:4, Informative)

      by rhild ( 659603 ) on Saturday September 06, 2003 @08:45AM (#6886698) Homepage
      Another thumbs up for 'Thinking in Java'. I can't think of a better book for someone intelligent, but new to programming. It covers lots of important concepts prior to introducing the language itself.

      I have plenty of Java books nearby and this is probably the most dogeared of the lot.

      The title says it all, 'Thinking in Java' gets the reader in the right mindset to understand a topic and 'why' things are the way they are.

    • Re:Thinking in Java (Score:3, Informative)

      by Twylite ( 234238 )

      Another vote for TIJ, but, what are you trying to achieve with this course?

      Most responses here seem to be "teach 'em good OO". What is the goal of this course -- what are the students supposed to get out of it? Since they aren't CS/IS graduates ("no programming experience") I can only assume they either need to (a) change careers, or (b) use programming as a tool in their career.

      In the case of (a) one may contend that knowledge of OO design is important, but also that an introductory course is far fro

    • Just posting to reiterate this suggestion. Teaches newbies OOP and Java, and experienced coders how to code in Java. Best coding book I ever read.

    • I'll add my thumbs up to this discussion as well. I wasn't quite a non-programmer when I picked it up (I had been through Learning Perl, and parts of Programming Perl), but as I relative newcomer to the craft, I thought it was great.

  • I have a professor that is in the process of writing his own book [ksu.edu] for introduction to programming class. I didn't think that it was terribly enlightening, and focused on some GUI toys early on, but he appears to have remodelled the book some, perhaps in response to these sorts of complaints. We used it in our class for a couple of years, but it appears that they've moved on. Some of the other students really enjoyed it though, and it makes a handy reference.

    What I do like about the book is that the book do

  • SICP -- The "Bible" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lacertus ( 171358 ) on Saturday September 06, 2003 @12:07AM (#6885514)
    I always wished I would come across an instructor who took "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (abelson, Sussman & Sussman [see here SICP [amazon.com]]) and mappend the fundamental theories presented therein to whatever language was currently invogue during that class/age.

    Mere learning of language, for the fit of mind, is a simplicity - you're talking maybe 4 months at the outside to learn the syntax of $x language, thru and thru. However, with the ideas presented in SICP, you can accomplish nearly any theoretical CS task. The implementation (though fun) is the easy part.

    I might recommend your assigning sections apropos to your course from the book as homework; in class, project the particular Java syntax upon those principals presented in the text.

    A most rewarding class would result, I think!
    • Except that many of the ideas of SICP are poorly expressed (or even inexpressible) in more complicated, less expressive programming languages.

      FWIW, the course here at Cornell descended from SICP uses SML and no textbook.

    • I believe Berkeley and MIT still proudly use SICP in their teaching for a CS course or two.

      As far as mapping that specific language to another language (say one that is in vogue), it sounds more like the role of a good programming language concepts/fundamentals class. In which case they should be teaching a student how to map any language to another.

      Recursion is cool (and SICP is a lot of fun), except when it sucks ass or you need to do something real world that is optimized and may not have a gig of stac
      • I have the first three volumes of TAOCP on my shelf and they are rarely consulted. To recommend their use in an intro to anything course is nuts. They just are not very accessible. As a reference, they are fantastic, but I probably woulnd't have taken many CS courses if they were taught primarily from Knuth's books.

      • Recursion is cool (and SICP is a lot of fun), except when it sucks ass or you need to do something real world that is optimized and may not have a gig of stack to solve a particular solution.

        Given proper tail recursion [wikipedia.org] - which essentially converts recursion to iteration, and which Scheme, SICP's implementation language of choice, supports - you don't need a gig of stack...

    • It may only take four months to master the syntax of a language, but there is more to programming in a particular language than syntax. In this case, I'm thinking of C++ (my favorite language).

      The syntax is simple. Four months should be more than enough. But even though you entirely understand the syntax of a language, it can take many years to become fully comfortable with the languages common libraries and programming idioms.

      I've been developing full time in C++ for the past 8 years or so and I am still

  • From reading the descriptions, some of the following may be too introductory... I'm assuming your students all have bachelor degrees in CS, and are picking up Java as a 3rd or 4th language...

    http://computerscience.jbpub.com/languages/java/ [jbpub.com]
    http://computerscience.jbpub.com/cs1/java/ [jbpub.com]

    • At the risk of being redundant, I'll re-iterate the AC comment that hasn't been modded up (in case you're browsing at +1):

      What part of no programming experience didn't you understand?

  • In addition (Score:4, Informative)

    by xagon7 ( 530399 ) on Saturday September 06, 2003 @12:24AM (#6885576)
    ..Thinking In Java IS a great book, but I also think Ivor Horton's "Beginning Java" is another perfectly suited book. There is a 1.4 edition out now. I simply cannot praise "Beginning Java" highly enough, it is the book I used to teach myself. Sometimes he is very verbose, but he certaintly gets the points across.
    • I must agree with your opinion on Ivor Horton's book. Unlike some courses the author seems to keep the pace of learning virtually constant throughout, which may or may not be an advantage.

      The diagrams are particularly good.
      • Another thumbs up for "Beginning Java". For object orientation with a Java emphasis though, I'd very higly recommend "The Object Oriented Thought Process". It's not a very large book but it covers a lot very quickly with good, short examples and diagrams.

    • Re:In addition (Score:4, Informative)

      by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 ) on Saturday September 06, 2003 @04:49PM (#6889197) Journal
      "..Thinking In Java IS a great book, but I also think Ivor Horton's "Beginning Java" is another perfectly suited book. There is a 1.4 edition out now. I simply cannot praise "Beginning Java" highly enough, it is the book I used to teach myself. Sometimes he is very verbose, but he certaintly gets the points across."

      I used this book in my own first year CS java course. I think that it does quite a good job of teaching exactly how to program in Java and how to use its object oriented techniques and other tools like overloaded constructors and polymorphic programming to your advantage. It would probably be appropriate to the submitter's needs.

      The thing to remember about Horton's book is that it is very specifically about how to program IN JAVA. It is not so great if you want to learn the things that CS is really about. It does not spend much time on algorithms or or the ever-important discrete structures. If you want to teach about those in java, I suggest you look up is Data Structures and Algorithms in Java by Goodrich and Tamassia. It assumes you know some java beforehand, and jumps right into some very good explanations of those things that CS really is about. I've used it and found it very informative and easy to understand.

  • it depends... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by DrEasy ( 559739 )
    It all depends on what exactly you are teaching. You could be teaching an introduction to programming, or data structures and algorithms, or Object-Oriented programming, or network computing, or... Java would probably be suitable for either of the items above, and there are textbooks covering each of them.

    If you are safely assuming that your students already know how to program (for example in C) and know about data structures, then Java becomes an ideal choice to introduce object-oriented programming. If

  • Ok... let's see here... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Saturday September 06, 2003 @01:01AM (#6885719) Journal
    Specifically, I would like to ground them in good Object Oriented principles,

    Good idea; too many people get out of college even at the Masters/PhD level without really understanding OO. (Even if it's not the be-all, end-all technique it was initially promoted to be, it's still a darned useful way of organizing large programs.)

    solid program design techniques,

    Sounds like a plan.

    and finally in the actual syntax of Java.

    Whoops, you're using Java? How does that fit with the first two goals? I can't think of a language that makes good OO harder while still having a "class" keyword.

    Oh well, guess you're stuck with it.

    Alright, ignoring the potentially flamebait nature of the above (though I mean it quite seriously), if you can avoid it at all, I'd recommend not worrying about teaching syntax. Seriously. Speaking from my experiences at a Certain Other Large Michigan School, you should just be able to say at the beginning of the course, "Hey, we're going to do an assignment in the second half of this course that will be in Java. Know Java by then." and let that be the end of it; we did that in Software Engineering at the grad level and it worked fine.

    Just throw them to the sharks; they'll manage.

    If you were going to toss Prolog or a heavily functional language at them unexpectedly, that might be worth some in-class time, but in-class time is a scarce resource; it really should only be spent on important stuff either unobtainable, or significantly more difficult to obtain, outside of the class. Java syntax hardly qualifies.
    • to respond to your trollish side....

      as a fluent perl and c++ programmer, and a reasonable java programmer, i have to say perl has got to be way worse than java for solid design and object orientedness
      • Yep... don't recall saying otherwise.

        I prefer languages that allow you to shoot yourself (like Python) because they're willing to trust the programmer, but Perl has the distinction of helping you shoot yourself, which goes a little too far. Somewhere on the Wild Wild Web there's a great article that describes how dangerous Perl is for allowing to layer quick hack on top of quick hack, until one day you can't layer another hack on top and you basically have to throw it out and start anew, instead of encoura
      • On re-reading my original post, I think I see what you were responding to. Note Perl does not have a "class" keyword; that's how bolted on the OO is. In fact I was thinking of Perl when I wrote that phrase. ;-)

        I honestly don't know whether I'd consider Perl OO easier or harder then Java; Java sure did fight me, tooth and nail, where Perl doesn't quite fight me that much. On the other hand, Perl is so kooky that that has to count against it.

    • If I enrolled and paid good money for a course entitled "Introductory Java Programming", I would be understandably pissed if the first thing I was told was "go and teach yourself Java by mid semester".

    • i agree totaly this hapened to me this last year.. (i graduationg in coumputer science). the course was data structures. i had no experience in java, the professor just said: -- it will be nice if you learn java. all he had done about it is that in the last semester he had tought introduction to programing to the freshments so he gave the link of the website he done to the freshemnts. the website had some links, some example programs... and some links for some books. i think the best one was bruce eckel'
    • I can't think of a language that makes good OO harder while still having a "class" keyword.

      I can. Python is an otherwise great language, and it has a class keyword, but its OO implementation is highly obnoxious and far worse than Java.

  • Just go with the standards (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ya know, "Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days" or "Java for Dummies". I'm sure your students don't want to get bogged down in all sorts of cumbersome theory, but just real-world, practical skills that they'll be able to put to use right away. Thats what these books emphasize, so thats why I'm recommending them.
    • It's a masters-level course, not a class at a community college. It should be about theory. In fact, I would take it one step further. Use class time to focus solely on OO theory and concepts. Inform the students that they will be responsible for designing and coding a project that demonstrates these concepts in any language of their choice. The kicker is, they will have to defend their decision at the end of the term and will need to be able to explain how exactly their project adheres to the idea of OOP.

  • OO Problem Solving Java x3 (Score:3, Informative)

    by prostoalex ( 308614 ) on Saturday September 06, 2003 @01:59AM (#6885915) Homepage Journal
    I've taught Java for a year (undergraduate level though) when I was getting Master's degree, and have assembled a collection of books that publishers sent for evaluation. I think the one you would be pleased with is Object-Oriented Problem Solving with Java [amazon.com].

    It's not a book about programming and hence it received one star on Amazon from people who bought it trying to learn Java from scratch while they would have been better served by Deitel&Deitel or Lewis&Loftus.

    Chapter 1, for example, goes through "Designing good programs" and "Software life cycle", in Chapter 13 there is a whole section dedicated to threads, not just pure code samples to copy and paste, but discussion targeted towards high-level concepts.

    Disclaimer: I have not used the book for any of my classes, just merely browsed it in my spare time.

    • It's not a book about programming and hence it received one star on Amazon from people who bought it trying to learn Java from scratch while they would have been better served by Deitel&Deitel or Lewis&Loftus.

      I'm not familiar with L&L, but we were recommended Deitel&Deitel when I started undergrad CS 2 years ago. I thought it was an awful book and rely almost entirely on the API docs (published and online).

      If you are intending to teach Java face to face, rather than just OOP and associa

      • You were too smart for Deitel & Deitel:-)

        Yes, the book is a hog, and there's a whole lot of irrelevant (to an experienced developer) stuff, like the origins of computers and what not. But the book is excellent for self-learning types willing to study home without attending lectures or going to school. Any time someone asks me for a book to learn programming on their own, and they have never programmed before, I recommend D&D.

        If you have been minimally exposed to programming, Deitel is a waste, mig

  • How about ... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 06, 2003 @02:15AM (#6885965)
    How about Barbara Liskov. Program Development in Java: Abstraction, Specification, and Object-Oriented Design. Addison Wesley, 2001. [amazon.com]

    Used by MIT in the class 6.170 Laboratory in Software Engineering [mit.edu], which is part of the Open Courseware offerings, so you can see the lecture notes and see what they do with it.

  • How about this book.... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "So you've decided to use .NET" by B. Gates
  • Programming Languages by Sebesta meets most of your requrements.

  • Beginning Java Objects (Score:4, Informative)

    by jpkunst ( 612360 ) on Saturday September 06, 2003 @03:13AM (#6886100)

    I recommend Beginning Java Objects: From Concepts to Code [amazon.com], by Jacquie Barker. It looks at object-oriented thinking and design first, and code second. (if I remember correctly, the first part of the book only uses pseudo-code).

    JP

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday September 06, 2003 @03:27AM (#6886132)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Core JAVA (Score:2, Informative)

    by aliquis ( 678370 )
    I haven't read any other boooks, and I don't intend to. The Core JAVA books has imho excellent quality and explains stuff very well. They also give nice hints and ideas on how to structure your programs, which seems like a much better way than the c++ like approach I would have done.

    They contains very simple language and information about the language, so anyone can understand it. They got lots of code examples and a small collection about intresting APIs after each part of text for the commands used in th
    • The CORE series rocks. It is an excellent resource for Java and "how do I .. . ." in Java. We used it at the University of Waterloo for our first year programming courses and we had much success!

  • I can certainly understand keeping away from doing a Java-web-developement course when you really want to do a Java course. :-)

    I would encourage you to consider using applets because they let you get a pretty graphic in 10 lines of code (which is encourageing to even grad students) and you can have them write a JDBC based client. The benefits of this progject are that it's real-world, it forces them to take the relational tables and populate logical objects, and they will lear a little about Java's dynam

  • You might want to check out Introduction to Programming Using Java: An Object-Oriented Approach.
    It's what the University of Alberta has used for a couple of years now and it's one of the few text books that I never sold after the course was over.
    Strater

  • None (Score:2)

    by GiMP ( 10923 )
    I own two Java books and have seen others.. they suck. It isn't that the books aren't well written, it is that Sun's documentation is really good. Just stick with Sun's documentation and you should be fine, IMHO.
  • What you are looking for doesn't exist, ok? If you want to teach master students program design, give them a book on program design, regardless of language. Special java idioms can be covered by your own lecture notes or another textbook, but there are few that need to be taught.

    For master students, picking up java should be trivial, and you should not spend time on teaching it to them. To avoid too many complaints, cover some introductory java book such as suns java tutorial in the first two weeks, and a

  • Nescafe might sell them, although I'm still not sure how you plan to teach all of that from a book made of coffee.

  • Head First Java [the book you want] (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Head First Java is published by O'Reilly & Associates. You can more information at www.headfirstjava.com or read the reviews at amazon.com. The best part of this book is that it doesn't assume you understand programming and it spends a large amount of time developing your OOP skills. It uses simple (some times comical) examples with great exercises to help with the learning process. From the hfj website:

    See why Tim O'Reilly says, "This is the first really new approach to computer books that I've see
    • I'm an old C programmer. I have Bruce's book but could never quite get into it. I found the Head First Java book here on Slashdot and Java makes much more sense to me now. Besides it's actually fun to read. Unlike any other programming book I've ever read. It gets my vote.
  • programming.java [amazon.com] is an actual intro textbook. The authors are top notch professors and the book is based around actual programming assignments which is IMHO the only way to learn a language. Unlike most other books it is specifically written for a college+ classroom environment (and has been translated into different human languages). If you look at the authors's other work you will see that its been backed by years of intro programming textbooks in other computer languages.
  • Although it may be strange to hear of a graduate level introductory class, I have been there.

    At my university, one is required to take introductory programming as a physics graduate student. Usually this class is taught in C, but recently they switched over to Java. The class is taught as though no one knows anything about programming (of course, many of us did).

    All I can say is...

    For the love of God DON'T use java!! Please, please think about what you're doing! Java classes invariably fall into the
    • "class about java, with some programming"
      I just have to comment that this is nearly the EXACT phrase I've been using to describe AP Computer Science at my high school, which is supposed to be the BEST place for math and science in the district. Lesson One, actually assigned in the class, was all about parts of a computer...and the teacher DID briefly show us the "right" way to read from the keyboard, then dismissed the three or four lines of code required as a huge pain and told us about the Terminal I/O
      • I've had a few classes on programming, and have absolutely hated all of them (that's part of the reason why I stayed away from computer science). At the same time, I've been able to teach myself a number of languages, and had a job in college doing computational physics.

        As you appear to still be in high school, I feel honor bound to offer you some advice:

        You will never learn as much in a class as you will on your own. Skip and test out of as many classes as you can (sounds like you might already be doin
  • "Effective Java" by Josh Bloch. The best Java book I've ever read.

    • Second that. The book discusses serious software issues - things like hashing, concurrency and synchronisation, inheritance/composition as methods for code re-use, the use and handling of exceptions, all the stuff a working coder needs to be aware of - in the context of Java and its particular advantages and pitfalls. It will make students worry if they haven't considered these things before, and it will help them to consider them in future. It's a real gem.

  • All the way.

  • Deitel & Deitel (Score:2, Informative)

    by Niet3sche ( 534663 )
    Have the greatest JAVA book I've come across. There's very little of this fumbling around in the dark with concepts as "what's abstraction?" and the like (even though all the high points of the language are hit - almost invisibly - in the text), and instead the book focuses on a more pragmatic approach that I found to be more of an "okay ... so you're a SMART chimp ... now let's take the language out and drive it around a bit", instead of a tome of terms. Very good book, that. I still use it to check mys
  • You'll have to face the fact that no single book contains the knowledge you wish your students to learn. So, you do what any great teacher does and take the best from various sources.

    A short answer to your request would be to get Learn to Program with Java [amazon.com] by John Smiley to teach the Java language and program construction in the easiest manner ever written. The method taught is very accessible for those who've never written a line of code. Have your students follow the instructions in Don't Fear The OOP [stanford.edu]

  • I learned from Lewis & Loftus' Java Software Solutions [amazon.com] and found it quite nice. It teaches Java, but does not focus on applets. It has plenty of good information (covering sytax, classes/objects, inheritence, string processing, exceptions, I/O, software engineering, Swing GUIs, and some applet stuff), not to mention OOP design guidelines, etc. The problems were not so interesting, but the prof. always made his own, which I suggest you do as well, just to keep things lively.

    Out of curiousity, what de
  • I assume your students already will know how to program and want to learn the syntax and spirit of Java. For the syntax side of things, the first few chapters of the O'Reilly Java in a Nutshell will suffice, although the rest of the books is largely a recapitulation of the API documentation. This should be coupled with Bloch's excellent Effective Java [amazon.com] for the "best practices" thing in that area. For understanding the spirit of Java and the best design principles, I have found that Coad's Java Design [amazon.com] incerdi
  • I'd recommend "Mr. Bunny's Big Cup o' Java". It's a short book and it has funny pictures. What more could a grad student at the U of M need?

    Go Bucks! (where the safe choice, Thinking in Java, is recommended)

  • What NOT to get... (Score:2, Informative)

    by jabberjaw ( 683624 )
    An Intorduction to Object Oriented Programming with Java by C. Thomas Wu. The book is almost decent, but leaves me wanting a lot more. Another minus is that the binding quickly deteriorates.

  • I can personally recommend Java Software Solutions: Foundations of Program Design [amazon.com], by Lewis & Loftus. We used this textbook (the first edition, link above is the 3rd edition) in an introductory programming class, and it's very focused on program design first, Java second.

    I will say, however, that a big part of what made the text successful in our class was the outstanding instructor, who gave a programming assignment every week, of his own design, rather than those from the book. Then again, I loane

  • Have you considered writing your own book?
  • "Master's level Introductory Java Programming class"

    ...is that a joke?
  • I may be impartial, because my teacher wrote this book. But I was a first year undergrad at RIT and this book reall clarified many things for me. And it's recent, having only been written about a year ago. And most of all, it's focus is more on the software development and thinking that on implementation. Modern Software Development Using JAVA Tymann and Schneider IBSN: 0-534-38449-8
  • JAVA Principles of Object Oriented Programming, or
    JAVA POOP is a pretty good book. It has the additional bonus of having a funny title.

    -D
  • Have you tried hardcover yet?
  • Be sure to check out the this course, which focuses on modular system design.

    http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering -a nd-Computer-Science/6-170Laboratory-in-Software-En gineeringFall2001/CourseHome/index.htm

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