Java Intro Book for an Absolute Beginner?

[Taz]

Any suggestions?

Preferably out of:

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/search?keywords=Java%20programming&pageSize=10

or

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/search?keywords=Java%20game&pageSize=10

would be nice, since then I'll know where to get them.

I'd like to get into Java, but the intro tutorial on this board doesn't help me much and I'm not having much luck elsewhere.

Thanks in advance.

[Tony]

Taz @ Sat Dec 12, 2009 3:51 pm wrote:

I'd like to get into Java

Why? No, seriously, for what reasons did you pick Java? Those might lead towards better suggestions.

Taz @ Sat Dec 12, 2009 3:51 pm wrote:

the intro tutorial on this board doesn't help me much and I'm not having much luck elsewhere.

Java isn't well suited for "absolute beginner" type of introduction. There's a lot of material that one needs to ignore and just let be pasted in, to get to the simple enough starting points. That causes a lot of problems in trying to understand exactly what you are doing.

[Taz]

Tony @ Sat Dec 12, 2009 4:34 pm wrote:

Why? No, seriously, for what reasons did you pick Java? Those might lead towards better suggestions.

To make games, specifically. [Simple, with 2D sprites or something.]

It was mostly a joint decision between me and another friend, since we want to learn together.

I think Java first came up because she was going to attempt to learn by editing this game's code to get into programming, and it just so happened to be written in Java.

After glancing over some code we figured it seemed straight-forward enough and decided on that.

Though after feeling a bit stumped, we're considering other alternatives/stepping stones.

[Tony]

Personally, I'm a fan of Processing

There are a few Processing.js (javascript implementation) examples at http://processingjs.org/exhibition that you can run in your browser.

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Another alternative might be Python with PyGames, but Dan would know more about that.