Java programming

[the_tiger]

I am teaching myself java from james goslings The Java Programming 3rd edition and java in a nutshell. Both these books are based upon java2 sdk standard edition version 1.3. Have there been any fundamental changes in the more modern versions (1.4, 1.5) that I should be aware of and are these books too out of date?

[Leif]

It's a tricky question, and it depends on what your reason for learning java is. If you just want to get a feel for the language, then I guess there hasn't been that much change since 1.3. If you want to actually use java to do something practical, then there have been some important changes. The gui system has taken quite a bit of an overhaul, the libraries have been improved and expanded, and there's been some syntactic sugar thrown in with 1.5, such as generics etc. Still, you can learn most of the important stuff using 1.3, and then pick up on the changes afterwards too I guess.