 the O'Reilly book "Java In A Nutshell" by David Flanagan.</p>

<p>Java is such a great language (once one understands the whole CLASSPATH thing) because it's so easy to learn and to use (so it's great as a first language), and it's plenty powerful for real-world development.</p>

<p>That said, I use it only for server-side development. I never grokked the GUI side, and the Java GUI apps I've run were both slow and frustrating to use.</p>
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