Java based books.

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

Recently have started on my journey of learning java, a bit of C++, and a few other basic languages in a 2 year period (during my time for the rest of my senior year and my junior college year/years) and decided that if i am going to apply to media arts schools it’d be best to have a pretty good amount of information already built up.

I recently got my first java related book, Java for dummies 2nd edition which is a few years outdated (still in the 1.5 SDK days) and have seen a quite of few others (i have 10 books bookmarked currently) and are looking to purchase quite a few of these books and start making a game during my junior college days (my school isn’t an acredited school so i must attend junior college first before applying to a university) and have notice many of these books have supposedly some topics covered and other books don’t have these topics but a different one which the last book didn’t have.

My question is, what books should i be purchasing, In what order should i be starting to read them? Java for dummies 2nd edition, which i’ll read 3 times before going on to the next book, has given me a very good insight of what things are and how they work and i would like to then go to the next step and so forth the one after that (i will read a book 3 times before i move onto the next one)

#2

You might want to take a look at the two books mentioned on the resources page:
http://www.java-gaming.org/index.php?action=resources

#3

Anyways i took a look at both those book but it seems to me that they require a decent/minimal sized knowledge base on java already which is something i still lack and am willing to get better by the end of the summer (planning on studying most of this summer for java and C++) and am not looking to buy those books atm but i have bookmarked them for the time being, i am mostly looking for books that understand the API (i’ll taken my time to look through the api and have remembered quite a few methods already but still looking to expand on that greatly) and will give me a way better understanding of programming in java.

#4

O’Reily (who published Killer Game Programming in Java which was linked to you by Riven) has a general Java book called Learning Java. It is a good starting point if you know nothing about Java. Here is a link to it:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781565927186

#5

Are those two books still relevant, or are they too old ?

I saw that Brackeen has a whole part on 3D, but he uses a software renderer that he creates ? Is it useful to learn/read that part ? Can it help even with OpenGL ?

In Davison’s book, he uses Java3D (I think). I read on this forum that Java3D is considered (almost?) dead. Can it still be useful to read his book to learn JME (or something similar) afterwards ?