Core Java

What Hacker News says

1. 62951413Apr 2024
   Core Java by Cay Horstmann (https://horstmann.com/corejava/) is a well-structured and concise review of major features. Historically, the most interesting chapters were scattered across both volumes. So completely skipping the "Fundamentals" volume was ill-advised while the "Advanced Features" volume had some boring and mostly unnecessary chapters.
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2. xdavidliuMar 2023
   I recommend The Core Java pair of books by Cay Horstmann, supplemented by Effective Java by Bloch. Those are probably the two most authoritative sources on Java out there, and both highly readable.

   I heard not so good things about Herb Schildt's book.

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3. xdavidliuMar 2023
   #1 is really out of date though; looks like published in 2005. I recommend Horstmann's Core Java, which covers up to Java 17.
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4. xdavidliuMar 2023
   not really good for learning Java though, more for intermediate Java programmers. A much better book for someone learning the language is Core Java by Horstmann, which starts from the beginning and goes into depth.
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5. irahulJan 2013
   > Opening a file and reading from it takes tens of lines in Java,

   Some of the bad Java is because of missing abstractions, most of it is because of badly designed api.

   http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.in/2007/05/amazingly-bad-apis.h...

   For your particular example, the api has been better since Java 5.

       import java.util.Scanner;
       import java.io.*;
   
       
       public class ScannerTest {
           public static void main(String[] args) throws FileNotFoundException {
               Scanner in = new Scanner(new File("some_file"));
               while (in.hasNextLine()) {
                   System.out.println(in.nextLine());
               }
           }
       }
   

   > You don't learn Java these days, you just learn eclipse. Much of the magic is happening in auto complete.

   I code in vim with eclim. There is nothing to be gained by manually writing the code for getter setter, or find-replace an identifier, or write placeholders for n methods of an interface...

   > I am not sure who picks up a book to learn java these days.

   It was some time ago(about 8 years ago), but I learned Java from a book(multiple books; I liked Core Java best http://www.amazon.com/Core-Java-Volume-I-Fundamentals-Editio...)

   Also, what good would eclipse do to someone who doesn't know what to write? Consider my example above. Unless you know how to read a file, how can eclipse generate the code for you?

   Or consider generics. How will eclipse help you understand what does <T extends Comparable<? super T>> mean? Eclipse is an aide. Unless you understand the language well, it doesn't help.

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6. gtaniJul 2010
   I picked these because the big box book resellers stock them (I think you're looking for background on things like primitives/autoboxing, java.util.concurrent, the JVM's startup options, profiling/debug tools, and maybe tips that make rhickey's clojure source easier to read):

   http://www.amazon.com/Core-Java-TM-I-Fundamentals-8th/dp/013...

   http://www.amazon.com/Java-Good-Parts-Jim-Waldo/dp/059680373...

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