Thanks dear.
I really appreciate your views !

[Context is: Andrew tells hthukral to spell words out fully, e.g. as opposed
to "u" for "you"]

[...]

   Incidentally, this is exactly what I thought ("Screw it, this is too
difficult to read. I'll help somebody else.") which is why I haven't
answered your question in this post, and any of the subsequent recent posts
("Solaris experimental ver. on WinXP", "javadoc", "Video Tutorial", etc.).

   Maybe in a few days, I'll forget who you are, and start reading your
posts again. Hopefully, you will have started writing easier to read
messages by then, and I will be willing to help you.

   - Oliver

   Or ask anyway. Sometimes you'll find a soul who's kind an generous
enough to be willing to spend the time decyphering your text. I don't mind
helping someone who doesn't speak English very well, but of course, if I
can't even understand the person, then it's very difficult, if not
impossible to help them.

   On the other hand, I doubt inserting a square bracket between the "l"
and the "p" of "help" is due to lack of knowledge of English. Far more
likely it was a typo (as the "[" key is very close to the "p" key on most
English keyboards) that the OP was too lazy to correct.

   It is this laziness that is a turn off for me, and which made me decide
not to spend much time helping the poster.

   - Oliver

people recommend - I'll go off and read that - I'll go through
TechBookReport's list if/when Bruce Eckel confuses me!

It was published this century - May 2000 according to my version ;)

In my experience, there's often very little difference between
editions of books.  For the kind of things that I need to use Java
for, it doesn't matter that I don't know the very latest
developments.

It's the fact that it's supposed to be a basic Java book, but the very
first program in Chapter 2 is a Swing program.  Swing relies heavily
on the programmer understanding OO design, but it's not until Chapters
5 and 6 that objects, classes, interfaces etc are explained.  It's
just my personal opinion that this is a very confusing way of trying
to teach Java and OO together.  Threads (which didn't even get
mentioned in a Java module I did at uni) are explained in great detail
(in Chapter 8) before the chapter on Strings and Strign functions
(Chapter 9).

Indeed, even the 1st chapter (with sub-headings such as Class Loaders,
Security Managers and Multithreading) seem a bit OTT for people who
are supposed to be taking their first steps into Java

One of the reasons that I'm going to try Bruce's book is because of
the review at http://www.techbookreport.com/tbr0012.html saying that
prior programming is useful, but knowledge of OO is not.  I'm quite
happy programming procedurally, but people keep telling me that my

a book which has explained OO stuff in a way I can understand, so I
want something as simplistic as possible.

Or maybe I'm just too stupid to understand OO.

Chris