Mike Whitehorne

This has been an ongoing mystery. Nice to know it was not me! I'll grab the patch.

If you are dabling or just learning, the text editors and command line tools are usually much more appropriate. It is normal to want to try out a slick IDE but the details of dealing with IDE tend to distract you from learning. If you are going to soon enter a production environment where your company has a std IDE, then perhaps you might start with that tool.

The Bible series is generally pretty good. XML Bible provides a generally good treatment but takes a little heat for its examples.

I have not seen the Scott's latest book yet, but his co-authored O'Reilly Nutshell book "XML in a Nutshell : A Desktop Quick Reference" was very good.

Are the mock test questions drawn from historical certification exams or simply equivalent types of questions that you guys have developed?

Core J2EE Patterns: Best Practices and Design Strategies is not bad but no source code. Much of this can be found on the Sun Java site.

Example driven approach is very effective if you know Java but need some help. Coverage is very complete: 26 chapters covering such things as file i/o, Swing, RMI, applets, Java Servlets, JSP, e-mail, JDBC, XML, multi-threading, etc.

The Wrox book is 4-stars on Amazon based on rankings. 1632 pages, 1st edition (September 2000), Sells for 41.99.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1861004656/qid=1000206471/sr=1-1/ref=sc_b_1/104-7981725-9233542

JavaComm is the only non-commercial package I know of. Should have all of the basic serial port management functions you need.

Another book that is new (June 2001) and getting some decent reviews is: Java.rmi : The Remote Method Invocation Guide by Esmond Pitt and Kathleen McNiff.

I would also agree that this is a very well done book.