This book is a classic "hands on" audit reference; written with the same "how to" style as "Operational Profitability". I highly recommend this book.

Great book, clearly written, lives up to the O'Reilly name. This is no "Dummies" book. Includes some discussion of the state of java and security, etc. I read the first edition, and the only thing it's missing is a CD... For a top-notch and complete Java reference, check out The Java Application Interface, Vols 1 and 2, by Gosling, et al. (Addison Wesley)

Exploring Java is the Java book I used the most out of all my Java books which includes the Sun Java Series. It is a very good technical book but definetly not for a beginner and by beginner I mean someone who doesn't know any type of programming language at all and doesn't know OOP concepts. But for a someone who has done a fair amount of programming and want to pick up Java. I must say that this book is a must have in your Java book collection.

This is the one basic Java book that I recommend to all my friends. The writing style is exceptionally clear and to-the-point. For someone with some programming experience, the book is informative and doesn't waste time. I suspect that novices will also find the book helpful, with with about 4 concise chapters on the Java language and object-oriented programming.

It gives an excellent overview of the Java API, including the AWT, and it's the kind of book you'll use for *more* than a week or two.

I'm pleased with the number of examples in the book: sufficient, yet not so many that the real stuff (the useful information) is left out. The examples are well chosen, and often are general-purpose tools that you'll want to use yourself or base your own code on.

While the book doesn't claim to go into depth on the more involved topics, it does have nice introductions to some of them, such as JavaBeans.

My only complaint with this book is that it focuses only on Java 1.1 and doesn't warn you when a feature being discussed is not part of Java 1.0. (Obviously, this becomes less of an issue as time goes on.)

Montgomery's Auditing, 2001 is just a supplement to the 1998 version. You need both the 1998 version plus the 2001 to be current. I would prefer to have it all in one book.