The 900 pages of CTM would be a lot to get through before school, if you were reading it cover to cover. (I've only read about 3/4 of it, though I burned right

The 900 pages of CTM would be a lot to get through before school, if you were reading it cover to cover. (I've only read about 3/4 of it, though I burned right through a big chunk of it in one weekend.) But, it's quite easy to follow, and for many fundamental CS topics, you can probably find a coherent summary in there when your other textbooks are a dead end. It's not going to cover Java API details, and it's weak on some specialized topics (parsing and compilers, for example), but it fits a lot of big ideas into a coherent whole. Other people will recommend SICP (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/), or would have, had this reached the front page. That's also quite good, but a bit more narrow in focus - depth rather than breadth.