Rating: 

The book comes with a very fancy Borland product, JBuilder 3.5. The book assumes you know how to use it already! This is a rather silly notion, as we would not need the book if we were already proficient at Java! The software's help functions are typical of Windows applications: not much help at all. Error messages are not indexed, all are done as slow-loading HTML files, and many answers are only available on-line.

Judging from their pictures, I was doing Fortran before the authors were born, have mastered many computer languages, and I adore Borland's Turbo Pascal. I'm no newbie, but I'm having to bang my head against a very poorly-thought-out software install system and a lack of bootstrapping instruction in its use.

I suspect, if I can ever get past this, my opinion will rise sharply.