Core Java, Volume I: Fundamentals — Cay S. Horstmann & Gary Cornell, Prentice Hall (Oracle) 2012 (9th ed. for Java SE 7), ISBN 978-0-13-708189-9
Core Java, Volume II: Advanced Features — Cay S. Horstmann & Gary Cornell, Prentice Hall (Oracle) 2013 (9th ed. for Java SE 7), ISBN 978-0-13-708160-8
These books have been superseded by the 10th edition for Java SE 8.
The Well-Grounded Java Developer — Benjamin J. Evans & Martijn Verburg, Manning 2012, ISBN 978-1-617290-06-0
A strange hodge-podge of chapters on wildly different subjects, this book isn’t outright bad as much as mistitled and unfocused. Read Horstmann & Cornell’s Core Java and Joshua Bloch’s Effective Java if you want to become a “well-grounded Java developer.” What Evans & Verburg offer instead is a brief tour of Java 7 innovations, low-level JVM features, alternative JVM languages, and some popular frameworks.
There’s no discernible rhyme or reason to the selection of chapter topics, giving the strong impression that the authors simply pooled whatever articles they had already lying around. Those articles themselves are quite readable and informative, but due to the random spread of topics only a few may be useful to any particular reader. You’ll want to get this book at a discount, if at all.
(See Developer Books for my complete review archive.)
Java is a very easy to use language once u get a hold of it…. if anyone is a beginner in java then they should attend some interesting java focused conferences which gives a huge knowledge abt the language nd very interesting, easy tips nd tricks which are very useful… few of the famous java conferences are Javapolis (devox), JavaOne, and recently i received a mail from oracle regarding their JavaOne conference.. They have many interesting sessions lined up fr this year… you can take a look at their sessions related topics here: https://www.regpulse.com/javaone2013/register.php?pcode=737266&src=4003&Act=1
I myself hoping to attend several sessions about Core Java Platform; JavaFX, Java Embedded, and Java Card and many more.