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Title: Long and bloated treatise
Review: I was forced to buy this book for a college course I'm taking on Java. The book is long winded in the extreme at more than 1,000 pages (not a good thing). The writing style is chatty to the point of sounding like the entire thing was done by dictation.Lots of unhelpful comparisons are provided along the way to Smalltalk, C++, and even FORTRAN. Lots of long dull example programs aren't even worth skimming. A typical example shows every possible combination of scalar type promotion. Not dull enough? Well how about the one which exercises every single operator on every single scalar type. You get the ideaThe sad part is that I have personally attended Bruce Eckels one and two-day workshops at Software Development Conference and found him to be a concise and coherent speaker in real life.
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