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I use this text for an AP Computer Science course, and find it to be one of the most confusing books on the topiic of Java and Computer Science. Being in multiple APs, I obvisouly cannot read every single word and frequently have to sort out what information is relevant in a book. In most of my textbooks, this is rather easy. Horstmann's book is, however, quite the exception. The author literally interupts his own sentences and sections with dozens of "Random facts," "Productivity Hints," "Advanced Topics," and many more of these callouts. One chapter, I forget which one, actually has three of these strung in a row, manking this book incredibly hard to read. After cutting out in the middle of a topic, it is very common to just, without warning, start back up five pages later. Avoid this book.

Excellent workbook for High School students.

Satisfied because I learned through this book for my class. Would recommend for beginners and students who are interested in learning Java.

I just started a 1st-year programming course which is taught in Java and uses this book, which has been ported from an earlier text for introductory programming in C. Unfortunately, the examples have not been ported. The book comes with a CD that supplies some classes which can be included in student's code, so that the C-like examples and assignments will compile and run.
Nowhere in the book will you find a mention of applets or running Java in web browsers, where 99.9% of Java use today takes place. The classes supplied with the book allow students to write programs that operate like command-line Unix programs from 20 years ago, and only interact with the user through the debugger's console window. When was the last time a Java program from a website asked you to type three numbers and press return?
From the point of view of the professor and TAs, this book may be ideal. The twisted pseudo-code submitted by their students for marking will look just like the same old C source code that they have been marking for years. From the point of view of students entering the real world at some point, things could get ugly. I can picture a student's first day in a co-op placement. "Java? Sure I can program Java, just let me install these third-party classes so my pseudo-code will compile, then I'll get started writing programs that no-one but me and Cay Horstmann will understand, and will probably break with the next update of the Java JDK."
To my professor's credit, she has been pointing out these problems with the book, and has forbade anyone to install the classes, or the demo Microsoft development environment that comes with it. I think that she should take the next logical step, and replace this turkey. Luckily for me, I already learned Java from "Learn Java on the Macintosh" by Barry Boone & Dave Mark. I suggest you do the same.

There are lots of people dissatisfied with this book, myself included. I really don't understand how anyone can find this book cohesive, and the little bit of information you get out of it you have to dissect the text for hours to get any meaning from it. This book loves to give you code to use and not tell you what in the world it does, just that you need it. So you use it for chapters then boom, in chapter 9 your finally tells something about it. That is not constructive. The learning process does not work this way. Most of the time the book hardly tells you anything. You can see that certain things must come before others, but not told why and with out being told what the code really does; its mostly just guessing why. I understand that the goal of the book is to teach programming and not a specific language, but this book does not successfully do that when it doesn't tell you what is going on. In my opinion, it confuses you to what is going on and you have to "unthink" what you've learned to actually progress with another book. I gave up completely on the book for my class and turned to outside sources to pass. Most of my classmates have been forced to do the same.

An excellent intro to programming from an outstanding author and programmer. It keeps reasonably upto date with the latest java version and presentation trends (pages are so full of color that reading it reminds me of a kid's birthday party.. personally I hate it, but it seems that's the current fashion..). My only problem with this book is its price and outrageous selling strategy. This book, as well as Big C++ and Big Java sell for 80 to 90 bucks in the US, where they can be imposed to college students as textbooks. Here in Italy, where this trick can't work they sell for their real value, that is from 40 to 50 bucks.
So, exploiting the enthusiasm of the student buying his new textbooks (I know how it feels I have been there myself) or just the plain fact that it can be imposed as required reading in some classes this text is oversold at almost double its real market value. I find this disgusting. Unless you are forced to adopt this text, go for a maybe less academical and colorful book (but reasonably priced ) by the same author, Core Java.

As a computer science major, I used this book in an introductory programming course. I already had a fair bit of programming experience, although this was my first actual class. This book taught me nothing new about general programming concepts. Such topics are covered equally well or better in dozens of other computer science books (less expensive ones, I might add).
However, I was new to Java, so I had hoped that this book would teach it to me. I was disappointed. The book uses its own package of classes which teach the student nothing of real Java. After using this book, I found that I had to start all over again when I wanted to learn Java, and it took me several months to unlearn the material in this book. If you want to learn programming concepts, learn real Java, and save money, then look elsewhere. I would recommend some of the Java titles published by O'Reilly or Sun.