Complete Java Training Course: The Ultimate Cyber Classroom (Prentice Hall PTR Interactive series) Book

The Complete Java 2 Training Course is a book-and-software package for teachers of rooms full of novice students. If you have any programming experience, the beginning section of the book will be tedious for you. If you prefer a chatty style, tons of real-world experience examples, and lengthy explanations, you may be out of luck. But if you're in the market for a tool to teach inexperienced students--particularly for internal corporate IS departments who need to get a bunch of fledglings up to speed quickly--this could be the perfect solution. The book shows its college textbook roots, going into great detail in the first chapter on exactly what a computer is with a lot of fairly redundant information for anyone remotely connected with the PC industry. But as it builds into later chapters, using many exercises and walkthroughs, the depth and power of this strategy becomes apparent. Utilising tiny steps and mini exercises, the book walks you through the details of Java programming at a glacial pace. It is also nicely spiced with good programming practices, common programming errors, and software engineering techniques. Unfortunately, the book has some college-level weak points as well. Every subtopic is covered precisely once, so if you don't get it, you may never. Furthermore, there are exercises at the end of every chapter for the reader to do... but the answers are never given! The software is acceptable, but not stellar. Essentially, it is large portions of the book rewritten, with a few hyperlinks, burned on CD-ROM. There are tests, but they consist mostly of trivially simple true/false or multiple-choice questions, and all you get is the "right" or "wrong" answer; you don't find out why you were incorrect in the first place. Going through the CD-ROM will give you a good, solid foundation for Java programming in much the same way that the book will, but is neither more or less helpful than the book itself. However, this book is useful for teaching a large number of students at once--and is intended to do so. Corporations may find it a useful bargain. --William SteinmetzRead More