Any Java developers here?

I'm going to learn Java and was wondering if anyone knew of a good book. I know there are a million books out there and reading the documentation/syntax is easy enough, but I need something geared a bit more towards actually building stuff with it, structuring applications, building a good foundation of best practices etc. Since it takes a little bit for books to get to China, I'd like to pick a good one the first time around.

 

I'm definitely a novice, but have experience in low-level assembly for microprocessors etc.

Have you tried Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel? LINK

There really aren't that many good ones, most of them are all pretty much the same in this case.

 

http://www.squidoo.com/javaresources

 

You're better off finding something for free. Many of the ones for documentation and syntax really don't go farther than that, but an online tutorial is probably a better bet.

Thanks. I've actually just decided to spend my time learning Rails. I think web applications are a better business these days and Rails should be way quicker and easier to do such things in than Java.

Good choice for web dev.