The 1st edition of this book was equally useful as an undergraduate textbook and as the lucid, no-nonsense guide required by IT professionals, featuring many code examples, screenshots and exercises. The new 2nd edition adds revised language reflecting significant changes in J2SE 5.0; update of support software; non-blocking servers; DataSource interface and Data Access Objects for connecting to remote databases.
A very "hands on" approach to network programming. In my opinion a book where more than half of the pages contain code examples, and the explanations are quite superficial, is not delivering more then what could be achieved by a few Google searches.