This book, as many have written below, is definitely not a "Learning" book, contrary to what the title implies. Having bought, read, and nearly worn out three of the O'Reilly Perl books (Learning Perl [Llama], Perl Programming [Camel], Perl Cookbook [Bighorn]), I was quite used to (dare I say "spoiled by") the very natural style and well-structured and well-paced writing of the authors of those books.
The first chapter in "Learning Java" is more like the Preface on steroids. Perhaps it was the preface, and someone lost control?. It basically gives a brief history of Java, and then tries to perform linguistic surgery by comparing various aspects of Java with those of other languages. Chapter two then dumps the reader into a seemingly simple program. Yes, it only displays "Hello Java" in a window, but it would help to explain the lines of the program from top to bottom, rather than skipping around. For example: import java.swing.*;, the first line of our simple program, isn't explained until much later (8 pages later!). The line "#!/usr/bin/perl", which is typically the first line of a Perl program, is explained very clearly almost immediately after it is introduced.
The writing style is also klunky: if you either don't already know Java, or don't know the authors' style, or both, it will be difficult to squeeze the right meaning out of what they write. i.e.- The reader should not have to even attempt to "read between the lines", especially not in a book that is meant to be introductory to the language..
My opinion overall: Not a Very Nice Book
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