Book excerpt: Extensively revised, the new Second Edition of Programming and Problem Solving with Java continues to be the most student-friendly text available. The authors carefully broke the text into smaller, more manageable pieces by reorganizing chapters, allowing student to focus more sharply on the important information at hand. Using Dale and Weems' highly effective "progressive objects" approach, students begin with very simple yet useful class design in parallel with the introduction of Java's basic data types, arithmetic operations, control structures, and file I/O. Students see first hand how the library of objects steadily grows larger, enabling ever more sophisticated applications to be developed through reuse. Later chapters focus on inheritance and polymorphism, using the firm foundation that has been established by steadily developing numerous classes in the early part of the text. A new chapter on Data Structures and Collections has been added making the text ideal for a one or two-semester course. With its numerous new case studies, end-of-chapter material, and clear descriptive examples, the Second Edition is an exceptional text for discovering Java as a first programming language!