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The book is in ten parts, the first three cover the language and the APIs, parts 4 and 5 applets and networking, part 6 programming strategies and debugging, part 7 JDBC, native methods, the virtual machine and security and part 8 linking Java to VRML, JavaScript, ActiveX and VBScript. The final two sections look at applied Java (Internet programs, games, image processing and databases) and emerging technologies (JIT, RMI, JAR, servlets, etc.) There are plenty of example programs, which are on the CD together with JDK 1.0.2, J++ publishers' edition, lots of utilities and HTML versions ofTricks of the Java Programming GurusandDeveloping Professional Java Applets.

Although large this book covers many topics and would act as a review of Java applications. The main problem is that the book was being written during the development of JDK 1.1 (the CD only contains JDK 1.0.2) and new topics are covered very briefly (e.g. the new AWT event system is not mentioned, multicasting is only mentioned, RMI is covered in half a page, JAR in just over a page and servlets in 5 pages). Rather than buying these monolithic books which attempt to cover a wide range of subjects to great depth I think it is better to buy a good first level text, then specialist second level texts targeted at particular types of applications (graphics, networking, JDBC, beans) which tend to be up to date in their area.