I've never liked reading tech books but this one I haven't fallen asleep to. Not sure if it's the book or because I'm reading it at the gym. In general the book is easy to understand, has good notes, cautions and examples. I'm however really annoyed with their examples with one character method and variable names. Somehow it makes it harder to read. I find myself stopping and saying to myself, where is that stupid A() or B() or a, b variable again? Where did they declare that? Were they trying to save money by printing one letter instead of a word?

I saw Dream a Little's review and came to the conclusion it may be peoples learning style that determines if they like this book. I am new at programming and the book used in the college course I took was Deittel's 7th ed. Java How to Program. This book left me with a lot of unanswered questions that other books I had checked out from the library could not answer. I was about to give up when I stumbled upon this book and was amazed and wishing I had found it sooner in the semester.
I found it explained a lot of the basics very clearly. It also had a lot more understandable examples given. Even though Deittel's book is over 1500+ pages it came nowhere near as good as the examples I found in Liang's approx 700 pages.
I was a bit spooked at the price when I bought it, wondering if I was going to regret it. But after using the book I concluded this maybe one of those instances where you get what you pay for.
Liang uses a lot of diagrams to show how the pieces fit together as well as simple to understand explanations.
If you are already a programmer in Java then I doubt this is worth the price, but for the beginner/novice who likes to see how the pieces fit together and wishes to understand why things go in the order they do, then this maybe the book for you.
If I later move to another language, I will be looking to see if this author has anything written in that category as well.

Got this book for an object oriented programming class. I have had very little programming experience, but the book has helped greatly in both learning Java and learning some of the fundamentals of coding.