My curiosity about Hotjava now sated, what of Peter van der Liden? I recall
that he used to be pretty active on Usenet and quite a prolific author and
Java advocate.

As I recall he used to author the Java FAQ (which now 404's). I liked his
writing style (dating to the ugly fish book) and the Just Java series. The
6th edition came out in 2004 and no errata has published since January
2005.

Is Mr. van der Liden still active in the Java community? I realize he's no
longer with Sun and without treading into personal matters, did he have a
falling out with the people there? In spite of being published by Sun, his
Java books did contain quite a few barbs about misfeatures in the language.