When I first saw "Head First Java", it reminds me of the colorful "conversational English" books I had when I started to learn English years ago. The casual, humorous books have turned out effective for English language learning. Is that style good for the Java language learners as well? Is this type of books for beginners only?
With those questions in mind, I started to read "Head First Java". Since I consider myself a Java expert (I wrote a Java book myself, after all), I decided that I would NOT read the book from cover to cover. Instead, I would randomly flip through the book for the humorous stories and photos. I figured that if I cannot learn much new about Java from a "beginner" book, I can at least have some fun.
Geez, I was wrong. I was ADDICTED to the book's short stories, annotated code snippets, mock interviews, puzzle games and brain exercises. They are not only entertaining but also informative. It may be a beginner's book but the stuff they cover are definitely deep enough for expert readers as well (e.g. multiple inheritance, polymorphism, inner classes, threads, RMI, ... just to name a few). The best of all is that I can actually remember the things I learned from the book because I associate them with the stories and pictures. I guess it has something to do with the fact that both sides of my brain are active when reading this book: The right side is for the stories and the left side is for the technical and logic stuff.
There are other great Java books (e.g. "Thinking in Java" by Bruce Eckel) in the market. But they are all very serious and require the readers to spend hours to read entire chapters. The great thing about "Head First Java" is that the bite-size code snippets and stories allow me to learn something about Java in my 5-10 minutes spare time, one piece a time.
The overall writing style is casual and enlightened. The presentation style (fonts and placements of graphical elements) fits the content very well. The book covers a wide variety of Java topics including: basic code structure and language syntax, OOP concepts, math and numbers, exception handling, the Swing GUI library, serialization, network, and distributed computing.
Of course, the casual style is not for everyone. I know people who love the re-assuring feeling from "serious" books. But I can re-assure you that Kathy and Bert are authoritative figures in the Java training community. The content is absolutely first class. I highly recommend "Head First Java" for both Java beginners and expert readers.
