Java was born more than two decades ago, aiming to be simple and targeting embedded platforms. Over the years, however, Java has grown to provide a rather rich set of features and can run on a broad range of computing devices. This makes it difficult for even experienced Java programmers to master the language fully. This book is an excellent, in-depth introduction to Java fundamentals. Indeed, in my 20 years of experience in Java development and IT education, this book is perhaps the first one that introduces Java fundamentals in such a thorough and comprehensive way, using a good collection of examples. Just as the author said in the introduction, the book serves as an excellent reference book to any serious Java developer.

However, I do not recommend this book to beginners. It includes certain background materials beyond the Java language, for example, programming paradigms, different polymorphism types, parameter passing schemes, and time-keeping history and mechanisms. These topics are certainly useful and some are actually core programming language design issues, but they might be too advanced for novice learners to move at a comfortable pace through the book or blur the focus on Java. Moreover, certain scenarios and examples discussed in the book are quite subtle and may be only relevant in rare situations. These discussions help readers to understand the limits and restrictions in the Java language, but may form obstacles for beginners to grasp the overall picture. If you are a novice learner and want to choose this book to start with, expect to read it iteratively and try not to feel frustrated and give up in the first pass!

A related perspective to the second point above is that what is allowed in Java is one thing and what is preferred following software development principles is another. Software development principles are beyond the scope of this book, and it is unfair to ask the author to include them in a book focusing on Java and spanning almost 800 pages already. But it would be nice to include a brief note at certain places regarding whether a particular construct is a good practice in reality and provide interested readers with references to additional sources. For instance, chapter 6 presents instance initialization blocks among other topics related to classes and objects. Although it is not incorrect to use such blocks to initialize an object before its constructor body is executed, a named, nonstatic method would be a better choice, as the latter approach would help to increase readability and hence make it easier to maintain a program.

As the title indicates, this book introduces only the fundamental topics in Java, those involving the language itself. Other topics like concurrent programming (multithreading), input/output (I/O), common Java data structures, and graphical interfaces such as Java Foundation Classes (JFC), which are usually included in other Java books, are not included here. Indeed, most of these other topics may each be worth a separate book. The two companion books mentioned by the author in the introduction [1,2] actually cover these topics. If those two books are of high quality as well, the three books together would make a good, complete collection on programming in Java.

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