This book is both a thoroughly comprehensive guide to the Java Language and an outstanding preparation tool for the 'Sun Certified Programmer for Java 2 Platform' exam. Written for anyone with previous programming experience this book provides coverage of the basic and advanced features of the language in a well illustrated easy to read text. It is a book to read and learn all about the language and core APIs but does not attempt to be a reference manual to the Java specification.

It is a relatively large book but extremely readable as it is littered with concise source code examples, tables, UML diagrams and a good number of review questions for every chapter. At the back there is a full sample exam, consisting of new questions which are supposedly close to those that can be expected on the real exam and a comprehensive answer section.

The author provides an extensive web site (http://www.ii.uib.no/~khalid/pgjc/jcbook/) consisting of a couple of sample chapters, all of the major source code examples and an errata. I would suggest that any even slightly interested person take a look at the sample chapters in order to get a feel for the quality of this title. This book does exactly what it says on the cover.

Highly recommended.