Rating: 

This book is a grab bag of several different things Java will do and how to do them. There were a few sections I personally don't care much about - scientific, graphic, music, and parsers (xml & html).

But there are sections that talk about things that were new to Java 5. This will be useful if we ever get off of 1.4 at work.

The Glossary was a nice suprize. I didn't expect to find a glossary of Java and OO terms.

I really like the boxes under the headings that tell you what version of Java or Open Source project will support the section.