i received the book on time. the condition of the book was brand new as stated. thank you for providing such great service!

I bought this book because it was required for a course. Out of all of the exercise books I have used, this is by far the hardest to follow. There are not enough examples to actually teach you the information. There are no answers, so you never know if what you're doing is correct. Overall, the book is vague in its descriptions and has not given me any kind of useful Java skills. I'm sure it would be good for someone who already knows a little about Java or that has a teacher standing right by them to explain everything. Even the exercises were not very clear and hard to understand. I would recommend searching for a different book.

most intro to programming books expect/assume you to know about programming before you can begin. This book actually teaches you the very basic and doesnt assume that you know anything. :-) Its probably the best one for beginners.

I purchased this for use in a Java class. The instructor swore by this book. In the end, it just wasn't worth the money. All the information I needed were already available online at through Sun and other Java resources.

I purchased this for use in a Java class. The instructor swore by this book. In the end, it just wasn't worth the money. All the information I needed were already available online at through Sun and other Java resources.

Most other books on Java are practically carbon copies of each other. They'll take you through the same boring sequence of learning. When you get to objects, you're just overwhelmed with (what seems to be) information of little practical relevance - or at least, no fun. One hardly gets the feel for what the Object Oriented programming hype is all about.
BlueJ gives you an IDE and code. Like most professional programmers, you won't be writing HelloWorld.java. Instead, you'll begin with code that was already writen by others. The book will take you on a tour in which you'll be exploring the behavior of objects. You'll be asked to reimplement classes, and observe the effects your changes have on the program's behavior. The IDE shows you class diagrams, so you can begin to analyze dependencies. Objects in BlueJ are "live", and you inspect their behaviors on the fly. This is unlike most other books, where you are required to use a text editor. This is miles ahead from the other 99% of tutorial books.
BlueJ almost feels like the Java programmer is in a Smalltalk environment. BlueJ gives the beginer a real feel for code reuse, modularity, and objects, and the IDE is an integrated tool in the development process, just like it is for a professional Java programmer. An outstanding book. Having gone through piles of Java tutorial books, this is the one to learn from. This one's truly for learning OOP.

I am learning Java on my own and had minimum exposure to programming. I have tried this book. Yes, it is good approach to teach OO with Java, but at the end I could not write program in Java confidently. I've tried other book that also emphasized on early OO approach. I can understand the concept but cannot write meaningful application. Then I got the book Introduction to JAVA programming 6th Edition, Comprehensive version by Daniel Liang. This book actually give me understanding and make sense that the previous beginner's book tried to emphasized. It gave me gentle introduction starting form very fundamental of programming to OO concept. The transition from fundamental concept to OO concept was painless.

In short, to me the Object Frst with JAVA is more suitable to peoples who have 'some' exposure to basic programming.

I am using this book for JAVA class at my University. It really sucks, because my teacher teaches like most other books teach, and this book has some weird pedagogical method of teaching objects rather than syntax. Terrible when your teacher wants to teach his way and it conflicts with this book.

Quick and easy example why NOT to buy this book: The "main" function is not mentioned ONCE in this book. NOT ONCE. So when people with zero programming experience started seeing my teacher put main up on the board, they were lost.

The compiler is more of a visual JAVA and would be great for an OOP class. But to learn JAVA its awful. It tried to avoid "syntax" yet it has complicated programs where knowing syntax is necessary. Skip this one unless you want to get a better handle on OOP after having learned JAVA.

I am a beginner at JAVA and I have tried other books and spent a lot of time making poor progress as they try to talk down to you. I am not an idiot and appreciate the fact that this book is by a real life teacher who is aware of the failings of beginners and helps to put these right. Combine this with an online discussion group for problems and you have an excellent learning environment

Had my first taste of BlueJ as a college student at Bell College Hamilton, my Java skills have increased tremendously mainly due to the principles and concepts learned from BlueJ.

This book stands miles above all Beginner java book's on the market today. The book comes with its own IDE "BlueJ". The book focuses early on Classes, Objects and clearly explains the concepts with little regard to code. The book then invites the reader to open up example projects with the BlueJ IDE and gets the user to create objects from the classes then examine the methods, again paying little attention to coding (There is plenty of coding and exercises in this book, but kept to minimum at this stage as it's vital to understand the concepts related with classes and objects and methods). This then enables the user to better visualize abstract concepts and object behavior.

The book uses an iterative approach and user finds that principles taught in the book are used throughout the book. The book teaches you to code practical programs such as a Database to contain CD and Video objects; most importantly it stimulates your mind and imagination. This enables the user to find other ways to apply the concepts to other problems. The book gets you to into the habit of thinking of items as objects. Plain and simple BlueJ gives you the right amount of Java knowledge without going into unnecessary details and allows the user to see the big picture and enable them to successfully start understanding more advanced Java material.

When I got to university the Students who used BlueJ at college were miles ahead in understanding Java language than those who had not. Most students who did not use BlueJ before university had a habit of writing procedural style programs with the Java
language.

Recommended !

The book seems to be written for a "new breed" of students in times of Mass-Education, that is: students who want to learn programming vocationally rather than scientifically; students who want to apply programming to "real-world" jobs rather than to study a programming language for the sake of its own beauty. The authors of "Objects First" are trying to make their book "interesting" for this new kind of student by adding a lot of application "projects" such as: little games, cinema ticket booking systems etc. This might feel somewhat strange (or even odd) to those people who come from a classical scientific-academic background where concepts were mainly studied for their own sake, but I think it is right that this new kind of vocational students are provided with a good book that suits their practical needs. Indeed, the "Objects First" approach is good, and it is only a very logical consequence of the "Problem Oriented" approach according to which progressive professors were confronting beginner students with Functional programming languages like Scheme or Miranda (instead of procedural Pascal or C) since the mid-1980s. What I appreciate most at "Objects First" is: this book comes with a CD that contains the really VERY useful BlueJ software development environment! The text and style of the book itself is, in my opinion, rather tiring and tedious, too packed and cluttered with "projects", too repetitive, too self-interrupting with all sorts of "windows" and "boxes" etc. The same contents could have been presented in a much leaner, much more concise and much less repetitive fashion. (At this point I seem to disagree with the book authors' opinion on how teaching should be actually done.) Also the book's language is, in my opinion, somewhat too coloquial and not "academic" enough (for example: too often they use the sloppy un-word "thing" instead of finding a more rigorous way of expressing what they want to say). On the other hand I must acknowledge that the "spoon-feeding" approach of this book (which I personally find somewhat too patronizing at times) really allows me to do my own teaching in the way I want to do it -usually I start with the concept of Class (thereby explicitly referring to classical Aristotelian Philosophy) before introducing the concept of Objects systematically as a generalisation of Data Structures (like, e.g., "Stack") which are wellknown since ever- and then I can leave the students alone to study this book on their own, in addition to what I have presented in my lecture. Indeed I must say that most of my students have bought or borrowed this book, and they seem to use it quite happily. As long as they are happy, I have no reason to complain, and this is exactly what the autors have predicted in their preface: students seem to like the book more than their teachers do. Another important aspect of this book is rarely mentioned by other reviews which I have read so far, namely the teaching of programming from a Software Engineering perspective, with a strong focus on software structure, software clarity, and semi-automated software testing. This is a very important aspect of programming, unfortunately often forgotten by other programming books (though, of course, a book on programming can never fully replace a book on software engineering). In fact I am using the BlueJ book's chapters on Testing (supported and semi-automated by BlueJ's "JUnit" test concept) and Design also in Software Engineering classes where the focus of the lecture is clearly NOT programming. I stronlgly support the book's idea of teaching programming from a Software Engineering perspective (rather than from the machine perspective), though on the other hand I can see that the mingling of Programming Concepts and Software Engineering Concepts can be somewhat challenging (if not overwhelming) for some of the slower and weaker students. [By the way: sorry for my clumsy English, it's not my mother language.]

This book is not bad for the beginner programer that wants to learn Java. My colleges is using it as a intro to computer science book. My personal opinion on the book is that it does teach u some of the java language but if you decide to program outside of the Bluej interface you will find yourself loss.

One really bad way to teach basic math in elementary school is to stick a calculator into a kid's hand and have her learn how to use it. The kid might be multiplying large numbers together in no time, but she won't have any real understanding of what she's doing. There's an analagous problem with learning computer programming languages using the latest whizzy integrated development environments (IDEs). The IDE does a lot of the leg work for you behind the scenes and code gets 'automagically' generated, but you don't really understand what's going on. Worse still, some of the major Java IDEs are so feature-rich that it's an uphill struggle just to understand the IDE, let alone to try and learn Java and object-oriented programming (OOP). If what I've just described mirrors your own experience in trying to learn Java using the popular Java IDEs, then read on ... the wonderful Bluej Java enviroment and this accompanying book, may be just what you've been looking for.

"Objects First with Java" is an absolute Godsend for anybody who wants to really learn Java from the ground up, and in the process, develop a clear understanding of object-oriented programming. The examples in the book are superbly illustrated using the author's "BlueJ" Java environment which comes on the CD included with the book. BlueJ lets you create your own Java modules and then interact directly with them, allowing you to experiment with their behavior as you edit and compile individual Java classes. Based upon the example projects that also come on the CD, you can alter or rewrite the Java code, compile it with BlueJ and immediately see the results. This kind of direct experimentation makes learning more fun and allows the reader to really assimilate the core principles of the Java language and the OOP paradigm that it embodies.

The book is beautifully laid out with code snippets, subject summaries and exercises all color-coded. The text is written in an accessible and conversational style that is lacking in a lot of the traditional, "dry" computer texts that are often about as much fun as having root canal work. In spite of this, the book manages to completely avoid the "light and fluffy" approach of some tutorial style texts that are overly chatty and ultimately rather lighweight. "Objects First" is a serious text for anybody wanting to learn Java and OOP and although I consider myself an experienced programmer in other computer languages, with considerable prior exposure to OOP, I never felt bored or talked down to by this book.

In summary then, I whole-heartedly recommend this book to new and experienced programmers alike who wish to learn Java well and my advice would be this: Do yourself a favor, put aside the complex Java IDE for now, buy this book, download the latest editions of BlueJ and Sun's Java environment from the web (the versions on the CD are not the latest and greatest) and REALLY learn Java!

Postscript - December 3rd 2005:
Just to follow up on the recommendations I made when I first wrote this review in May 2005 - thanks to BlueJ I was able to learn Java sufficiently well to write a few small scientific applications, actually using the BlueJ desktop as a development tool. Because BlueJ doesn't feature a graphical forms designer, I was even able to learn Swing in some detail by "hand coding" all my own forms using layout managers, tabbed and scrolled panes, different border styles etc. as well as implementing all of my own event handlers. Thanks to the excellent learning experience I had with Bluej, I was able to learn to use the powerful NetBeans Java IDE because I felt at home with all the Java concepts and could really understand what was happening behind the scenes.

The most amazing thing of all though, is that I still find myself actually using the BlueJ environment as a development tool for prototyping and testing some of my non-graphic classes. Its intuitive interface for creating and interacting with classes is superb and when I want to work on a larger Java project that includes graphics and GUIs, I switch back into Netbeans and import the classes I prototyped with BlueJ directly into the project. So there you have it - BlueJ really works!

More than that, after more than 20 years in IT, this is also the best IT text book I have ever read, end of story. I had done a 5-day Java course some months before I read the book, and found it a real slog. Just as the authors claim, the syntax first approach which was used in the course, was as confusing as hell for all of us old COBOL mainframers there.

Although you may find BlueJ is not without its bugs, the concept behind it, of visually displaying objects, and not emphasizing the Java Main method, is truly inspired (get the book if you dont know what I mean)!

One thing: make sure you get the 2nd ed of this book, I found some annoying quirks in the 1st first edition, that the authors have cleaned up here(eg, you had to trawl thru their website to get some of the install instructions).

To make it short: this is the best book I've seen so far if you want to understand what object oriented programming is about, and not just memorise the Java syntax.

The book really takes you through the process of developing applications, with great attention to detail in respect to object-oriented style, and you get the Java details, almost as an aside, automatically.

I love the fact that the book does not just present complete finsihed projects, but talks you through various stages of development, taking the magic out of software development.

This book is clearly for beginners, but it is so well written that even people who think they know how to do this stuff will find something worthwhile in it.

Not all intro Java books are created equal, and this one is definitely worth the price.

I've had formal education in 3 programming languages, and this book is by far the best one I've ever read. It's because the chapters walk you through the design, implementation, and refactoring of actual Java projects. Vocabulary and concepts are taught in the process, so you find yourself absorbing the facts by necessity.

The book comes with an application called BlueJ, which models Java classes and object relationships. You can check your work against code samples on the CD as you complete the milestones of each project.

If you learn by doing, and you need to learn Java and OO, this book is for you.

I didn't buy this book for an introductory course in college, I bought it cause I wanted to go through some topics that weren't that clear for me. I definitely have to say this is a great book for reading. As some others have said, this is no reference book, this one is for enjoying and learning basic concepts not nicely taught in college. Buy it if you are a newbie or a not so newbie who wants to review important things in OOP and Java. An important thing is that since this is not a reference book, you won't find many examples regarding a certain topic... for that you can use the internet

I haven't finished it yet, but so far so good !!

I have used this book as a textbook for an introductory Java course at a community college for the last 3 semesters. Of all of the textbooks I have looked over and used (and I've seen a lot of textbooks!), this one provides the very best introduction to object-oriented programming and Java. Java's basic syntax is deceptively easy, and it's really no trick to get even the most challenged student to follow directions and get an applet working. But, that approach has not produced students who have the least clue how to write their own applet or application outside of class. The syntax-first approach does no favors for folks who have a Cobol/mainframe background either. It's the objects part of Java that is the trick -- in addition to an understanding of how to use the API documentation. Some very good examples are used to introduce OOP/OOD concepts in an orderly fashion; syntax definitely is secondary in this approach. The BlueJ tool provides a "learning IDE", which is an important teaching aid. I have had excellent results with students of many differing backgrounds, and intend to continue using this text.

This innovative and remarkable book doesn't rate 5 stars because of a lack of basic textbook support features. Some rather below-average lecture slides are provided and about 1/2 the exercise solutions are available. Absolutely no test question bank is provided. This makes teaching from this text a far more time consuming exercise than using the average textbook for any instructor, and somewhat intimidating for an instructor who does not have an excellent industry background in Java and OOP/OOD. On the other hand, there is a mailing list for teachers using this text, and I have found David Barnes and Michael Kolling as well as other instructors to be very responsive to postings to this list.

The lack of solutions may prove somewhat frustrating to self-learners as well. But, I suspect that participation in the BlueJ mailing list should provide the support needed.