Java course litterature choice

Question

Hello fellow Archers!
I'm heading for uni this autumn to study Software Engineering.
And my first coarse is on Java and I've had some troubles locating the books
other than on e-shops. Which makes it hard to get a good impression about the
books, so I've turned to my fellow archers in hope that someone here has
used any of these books and can give me an opinion (:
o  David J. Barnes and Michael Kölling, Objects First with Java; a
practical introduction using BlueJ, third edition, isbn 0-13-197629-
X, Prentice Hall, 2006. (2nd edition is also usable, but 3rd edition is
preferred).
o  John Lewis, William Loftus, Java Software Solutions: Foundations of
Program Design: International Edition, 6/E, 0321549341 
o  Walter Savitch, Absolute Java: International Edition, 3/E,
0321505042
o  Y. Daniel Liang, Introduction to Java Programming, Comprehensive:
International Edition, 7/E, 013605966
Since I've dabbled with Java in school some years ago, and been doing some
other programming since I don't really need one that is first and foremost targeted to
non-programmers but more for a book that I can have on my shelf/desk most of my
time during my first year of uni.
Thanks on beforehand!
-- Sebastian

Answer 1

sekre wrote:How is the book in terms of source code examples are there many/few, practical/strictly theoretical ?
The book I had in High School were totally useless in terms of source code examples so you basically had to have a second book simply to look at some examples. Was kinda a bummer for our teacher
I think there are a lot of examples. Not like on every page but definitely every other page. As far as how practical the examples are, I guess they get the point across of whatever he's trying to show .. they are fairly understandable.
sekre wrote:How are the exercises if any in the book? Short and relevant or requiring more problem solving than `Hello World`-ish exercises?
every chapter has exercises at the end (with solutions). They range from conceptual questions to actual programming assignments. There's a companion website that has solutions to the bigger coding problems. I've never really done any of them as the course that used the book had custom problems and didn't take the ones from the book.
sekre wrote:And last question, at the beginning of new chapters do they early introduce you to some sourcecode for that specific chapter or do you have to read through 5-10 pages before you actually see some relevant code?  (Strongly prefer to see an implementation early since it helps me understand what I read)
as far as Savitch's book is concerned, he usually dives right in with text in the beginning followed immediately by either diagrams or actual source code to illustrate what's going on.
Like I said, I liked that book a lot and it's not "dry" or anything like that.
There's nothing about reflection in this book and general design patterns are not really covered at all.
I guess it does what it's supposed to do, i.e. get you started with Java(introduce you classes, methods, generics, exceptions, collections)
this might help.. these are the chapters w/ page numbers where they start
Ch. 01 - getting started 1
Ch. 02 - console input and output 57
Ch. 03 - flow of control 93
Ch. 04 - defining classes I 163
Ch. 05 - defining classes II 247
Ch. 06 - arrays 333
Ch. 07 - inheritance 413
Ch. 08 - polymorphism and abstract classes 467
Ch. 09 - exception handling 507
Ch. 10 - file i/o 561
Ch. 11 - recursion 633
Ch. 12 - uml and patterns 671
Ch. 13 - interfaces and inner classes 693
Ch. 14 - generics and the arrayList class 739
Ch. 15 - linked data structures 783
Ch. 16 - collections, maps and iterators 881
Ch. 17 - swing I 923
Ch. 18 - swing II 1001
Ch. 19 - java never ends... 1065