Review of TIJ 4th Edition ( upto Generics chapter)

I wouldn’t say I decided to read “Thinking in Java”  from Bruce Eckel by chance. I knew about this book 3 or 4 years back and never made a conscious effort to read it thoroughly, never had to as well.

Now that, I have decided to improve my mathematical and programming skills over a period of 12 months, I decided to take a plunge into this book. Recently,I have developed a strong interest in Theory of Computation (algorithm development) and computational mathematics and is consciously trying to improve myself on a daily basis.Today is the 60th day, after I made my decision to improve my programming and maths skills.

After fiddling with Perl,Python,Java and C++ during initial part of these 60days, I learned that, I am better off to start with Java 1.5 and then learn C++ to implement programs with better execution speed. It is also interesting to note that, after learning about Generics in Java, I am no more afraid to learn STL in C++ :)

During my lookout for a PDF based textbook to help me learn the nuances and inner workings of Java, I went back to my old collection of e-books and dusted out TIJ-3rd edition. Java gets updated every now and then, and  I thought it would be better to read the latest version of TIJ, which is 4th edition.

My observation so far is, it is a good book no doubt but the language used is at times confusing. Secondly, I feel Mr.Bruce has taken too much effort to explain certain sections thoroughly and in a easily understood manner, while there are places where he has complicated things by writing examples that are too big to be deciphered by a novice programmer on the very first go.

Good points:

  1. A good book to get a very nice introduction to Java 1.5 and its features.
  2. Some of the sections are explained very well.

Bad points:

  1. Language used is too complex at times.
  2. Too big examples that can waste lots of brain cells and may need more time to understand.

I will write a more detailed review after completing TIJ 4th Edition.  This is my opinion after reading TIJ 4th Edition upto 533rd Page.