Small concepts which only take a few words or a sentence to explain the author spends PAGES explaining. The author is so verbose. It's a pain to read and that's why I stopped reading it.

Also the example programs given in the book are often useless programs which do not reflect a real life application of arrays, objects, etc. I can't believe I paid $75 for this book. With that kind of money, I could have bought 3 REALLY good books from OReilly or something.

The other reviewer is correct. The author beats the reader over the head on some concepts and spends way too much time on esoteric details whcih are nonessential to the novice programmer anyway.

I only recommend this book to people who need something to put themselves to sleep with.

Code snippets are repeated often "for convenience" (to save the reader flipping back a page, and coincidentally to add pages to the book), and many of the code snippets introduce very poor techniques, without cautioning that this is not the way to write real code.

It seems that the author can't decide whether the book is simply an introduction to the language, or a first book on programming in any language. Sadly, it doesn't succeed in either way. The review of basic types is stultifying to those experienced in writing code, yet inadequate to those with no prior experience.

If this were priced at the level of a "Dummies" book, it might be forgiven some of its shortcomings, but as it is intended for use in schools, and as I encountered it in a college-level introduction to Java, no forgiveness is possible.