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In search of the best Java book for beginners

A comparative review of 7 intro-programming language books

By Laurence Vanhelsuwé, JavaWorld.com, 02/01/99

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. What's this?
Until, say, 1996, I wouldn't have blamed any teacher still using Pascal as the main teaching prop in an introductory computer science curriculum (often code-named CS 101 or CS1). The obvious alternative (C++) was quite rightly considered by many teachers to be a pedagogical minefield. Today, however, there is no excuse: If you're not using Java to give your students their first taste of programming, then you are leaving the door wide open to be rightfully accused of not giving your students the best possible computer science education.

In the past year, a small minority of teachers found themselves unsatisfied by "just" pushing the teaching envelope in their respective classrooms (that is, by ditching Pascal and the legacy of its generation's procedural programming style, and adopting Java and its modern object-oriented programming style). These pioneering few went a step further by writing teaching texts for complete beginners, betting the whole shop on Java.

This month's book review takes a look at seven books that share the goal of teaching complete non-programmers how to program, and to do so with Java. (Notice that these books are quite distinct from those books designed to teach Java to programmers who've never used Java before. These books are for students who've never programmed with any computer language before.)

The titles reviewed are:



Below is a comparison table to provide you with a bird's-eye view of each title's main characteristics.

Java For Students Java Gently Java -- An Object First Approach Introduction to Programming Using Java -- An Object- Oriented Approach Object-
Oriented Programming in Java		 Java How To Program Computing Concepts with Java Essentials
Price (U.S.$) 8.00 6.95 4.00 7.95 9.99 8.00 7.95
Pages, Chapters (Appendices) 586, 29 (8) 508, 15 (2) 394, 17 (3) 783, 14 (4) 953, 16 (2) 1063, 18 (6) 624, 14 (3)
Authors 2 1 1 2 2 2 1
Glossary Poor No Yes Yes No No Excellent
Index Poor Poor V. Poor Yes Yes V. Good Yes
CD-ROM No No No No Yes No * Yes **
Listings density (lines/page) 48 56 53 48 58 50 50
Object-oriented early? No Yes Yes Yes Yes No No
Applets(A) or applications(B)? A B B A A&B A&B A&B
Graphics early? Yes No No No No No Yes
Support classes? No Yes No No No No Yes
Keywords highlighted? No No Yes No No No No
Suitable for hobbyist? No No No No Yes No No
Overall score 6/10 4/10 2/10 7/10 8/10 6/10 8/10
* The book doesn't come with a CD-ROM, but Prentice Hall sells a different product that combines the book with an interactive CD-ROM. See the book's review below for details. ** Strictly speaking yes, but the CD-ROM content is unrelated to the book's content!

In the absence of tools to calculate the true cost-per-bit equivalent of a book, the "Listings density" row gives you an idea of how dense or "aerated" the program listings are. Low lines and/or page values usually mean unreadable listings and a high page-fill factor, so the higher this value, the better.

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Resources
  • Academic institutions teaching JavaA slightly out-of-date list maintained by Sun http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/pandp/javaschools.html Should Java be taught in first year Computer Science? A very interesting site for teachers. It contains several links to other sites of similar value. http://www.cs.uwa.edu.au/~chris/java-in-cs1/
  • Java in the Computing Curriculum Conference (JICC3). South Bank UniversityLondon on Monday the 25th January 1999. http://www.scism.sbu.ac.uk/jfl/jicc3/
  • Java -- An Object First Approach http://www.scism.sbu.ac.uk/jfl/Chapter1/chap1.html
  • The standard, free, platform-neutral documentation to the Java classes. http://java.sun.com:80/products/jdk/1.2/docs/api/index.html