Bah, the next bit on the same page: There are a small number of excellent Java books. I like the official specification and the books by Arnold and Gosling, Ma

Bah, the next bit on the same page: There are a small number of excellent Java books. I like the official specification and the books by Arnold and Gosling, Marty Hall, and Peter van der Linden. For reference I like the Java in a Nutshell series and the online references at Sun (I copy the javadoc APIs and the language specification and its amendments to my local disk and bookmark them in my browser so I'll always have fast access.)