Recently someone claimed that "Thinking in Java 3",
 contained this sentence:

 Here, Eckel writes:

     »object that's defined«.

 Objects, however, are not "defined", they are /created/ at
 run-time. Names of reference variables are being /declared/
 in the source text, not "defined".

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/statements.html#5920

 Then, he continues to write

     »argument reference be final«.

 This might intend to say that a reference parameter was
 declared with "final". "final" is not an attribute of a,
 /reference/, but of a variable.

 However, this is not about /arguments/ (the reference
 arguments do not have to be declared "final" here), but
 about /parameters/. The distinction between these two
 Java terms seems to be unknown to Eckel.

 parameter:

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/names.html#6.8.7

 arguments:

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/expressions.html#15.12

 He also writes:

     »the compiler requires«.

 It might be the case that the compiler of Mr. Eckel indeed
 requires this, but he should teach a language instead of an
 implementation, so it might be preferable to write
 "the language specification requires«.

 Also, anonymous inner classes are not being /defined/ in
 Java, as Eckel writes at the beginning of the quotation, but
 they are being /declared/.

 Moreover, "anonymous" is an unnecessary restriction, because
 the assertion is valid for /all/ inner classes. Someone
 learning by this sentence thus needs to learn anew at another
 time that this is also valid for non-anonymous inner classes,
 or he might believe erroneously for an indetermined amount of
 time, that it is only valid for anonymous inner classes.

 Is there a way to improve the sentence? One attempt by me:

     A parameter to be used within an inner class of its method
     needs to be declared »final«.

 Even the Java Language Specification itself is easier to
 read than Eckel (and of course, much more correct):

     Any local variable, formal method parameter or exception
     handler parameter used but not declared in an inner class
     must be declared final.

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/classes.html#8.1.3

 All the reported faults have been found by me within a single
 sentence chosen at random (I did not read the book, but
 discovered the sentence in another posting, claiming to quote
 this sentence from "Thinking in Java".) If one extrapolates this
 error quotient to the whole TIJ, it gives a horrid impression.

 Some books might sell chiefly because the buyer wants to
 express agreement with their title. When one is learning a
 foreign language one does not want to think everything in
 English first and then painfully translate it word-by-word.
 So one might choose "Thinking in Java" instead of a
 garden-variety "Introduction to Java", because one longs for
 the promise given by its title, not suspecting that the author
 Eckel himself might be far from "thinking in Java".

Yes we have been prescribed a textbook called SL-275 but it has only
one complete example. Everything else is just code snippets.
Unfortunately the teacher isn't very good too. But thanks for your
suggestion, Sun's tutorial seems the best option at the moment.