Great Books...Free!

These are not light reading, but if you write code of any kind, I think you owe it to yourself to go to Bruce Eckel's website and check out "Thinking in C++" and "Thinking in Java". They're absolutely top-notch books, and I have to say that the early versions of TIC++ volume 2 were invaluable in a big project I did here at work a while back.

Bruce makes them freely available, so you don't have to shell out a dime for the books, but if you're like me and you get as much use out of them as I do, you'll buy the printed copies either online or from your favorite bookstore. After reading TIC++ volume 1 online I went straight to the bookstore and bought it. It's that good. I didn't even blink at the price (which I always do when I look at computer books; fifty bucks is a lot to pay for a book). Same for TIJ.

These are great books. I only hope that TIJ gets updated for the recent release of Java 1.5 (or Java 5 or whatever they're calling it...Sun's habit of naming its releases for the minor version is annoying). Thanks, Bruce!