A Canadian by birth, Naismith, a physician and minister with additional degrees in education and psychology, also invented the football helmet and taught sex education. Naismith never made any money from the game he invented. In fact, he refused fees when he spoke about basketball in public, and he once turned down a substantial sum to endorse cigarettes. Amos Alonzo Stagg, a YMCA facility member and a player in the first basketball games, recommended Naismith to start a basketball program at the University of Kansas. He took the job, which he held from 1898 until his death in 1939, though he coached basketball for only nine years. The inventor of the game is the only coach in University of Kansas history with a losing record: 53 wins and 55 losses. An amazing man and a wonderful look at his YMCA invention: basketball

I think all books are good but can be better. This one I think is better but could be worse.

This is the worst java book I've ever read. The book is unorganized and the content is not suitable for the beginner at all.

The companion CD-ROM is useless.

If the authors would like to publish the new version for JDK 1.2, there will be a lot of works they need to get accomplished.

Simple words from me.... Don't buy this book.

Covers alot of fancy staff but has a great lack of contents. It seems like the author has rushed through the book just to fill it out with the Java 1.1 features and forgot to describe the import basics behind the language. There's now way you're gonna be a Java guru by reading this book!

It is very thorough. Almost everything important about java is in there including JDBC, JNI, Java Beans, Servlets, security management, even the specification of the virtual machine and most is explained well understandble. It is the best java book I ever saw!