Walter J. Savitch (1943–2021)

As a basic introduction to programming and to Java, I suppose it's OK. It seemed unnecessarily brief on points I thought would most warrant extended discussion, and unnecessarily expansive on points I thought would have been better handled very briefly, but since very little of the material was at all new to me, I don't have a good sense of how his pacing and organization serve his intended audience.

There is one trivial problem, however, that I find very telling: his placement of braces in show more sample code. In C and C++, it's a matter of significant debate as to whether opening braces should be alone on a line, visually aligned with their matching closing braces, or immediately following the statement or expression the block is attached to---some companies, organizations, and major projects require the one, and some the other. So if this were a book teaching one of those languages, his consistent use of the former style would be reasonable, though it wastes the equivalent of a page or two of vertical space. In Java, however, no major project uses that style; this book, and examples largely produced from (a later version of) it by my current instructor, are the only places I have ever seen Java code using this style. So where else is this book likely to mislead? show less

Absolute Java works better as a reference than a textbook. Jargon is sometimes used on one page and not defined until several pages later!

Agreed to teach a class that uses this text. Poor. Long-winded, bad examples, odd order of presentation, and when you take into consideration what they charge students for this, ridiculous. Trivializes the material by putting cornball humor in the sample code. I had to stop and make sure this book wasn't aimed at middle school kids.

I had the Deitel and Deitel as a student in 1998, remember thinking that that book was bad, it now seems not quite so.

Not a bad book to learn C++ for the first time, though I've nothing to compare it to. I think the example programs are a little too fleshed out.