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Comment by larrys | Hacker News Reader

Having literally deciding to learn java last week for no particular purpose other than having enough understanding to be able to comprehend our software (which is written primarily in java) and prevent brain deterioration, I'm encouraged by the fact that the comments in this thread (so far) don't appear to be very negative (like when reading about php).

While I did buy a book, I wonder if anyone has any suggestions on a good java beginner's book assuming someone has "prosumer" programming knowledge (shell programming, some perl, some php, sysadmin skills and so on). Suggestions?

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Welcome to the Java world! Like some of the comments so far I think the Java world is actually a pretty cool place to be right now, the language and approaches are becoming a lot less verbose. I blogged about some of the best Java books, hope it'll help you out! http://scalabilitysolved.com/dont-hold-back-your-java/

Thanks for that.

Question though. The first book you listed (which got excellent amazon reviews as well) was published in 2008. Typically I've been biased into thinking that a book had to be somewhat recent. Obviously this isn't the case here though. (Do you agree with that in some situations btw?). I would have never purchased this book if you hadn't pointed it out so thanks it's in my cart.

Effective Java is a solid choice, and a lot of the advice is still relevant six years later :) Also, JCIP is a go-to if you want to get more than a passing handle on concurrency in Java.

Agreed, the java books I listed still provide more value to my core Java than more recent books. I do the majority of my Java work now in the Play framework, when I use a new framework or library blogs and stackoverflow are my go to resources, for a deeper understanding of the library then those books are the way forward.

Warning: These are not beginner books.

"Learning Java" http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000001805/index.ht... seems to be a decent review of the language and ecosystem, although it doesn't cover many of the new technologies in common usage (many of which are mentioned in this thread).

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