Have studied the weighty Java tome through page 46. To reach page 71 was my assignment. Problems with 1100-pp. book:
-- It's over 1100 pp., thus is daunting in scope.
-- It's 2 inches thick, thus is both unwieldy and heavy.
-- The type size is around 7 or 8 point, way too small; some of the examples are smaller still, thus well-nigh illegible.
-- The column width is too wide and the margins are too small, thus one's eye-tracking is strained.
-- A man wrote it. This can be perfectly fine, but in techville, sometimes a woman teacher's angle meshes better with a woman student's mind.
-- There is too much math in it already. I must ask my tutor what percentage of Java programming involves math.
-- The math in the book is not made digestible for non-math minds. I need to work with colored blocks, games and in other right-brain/intuitive ways. Concrete, not abstract, especially not at the beginning.
-- The book is from 1999, which is kind of old in techville.

Therefore, I've ILL-requested Java 2 for the World Wide Web, by Dori Smith, pub. 2002. It's only 345 pp., and is part of the excellent Visual Quickstart Guide series. Each page has a narrow column of large, easy-to-read text, next to a column of pictures (generally screenshots). Granted, it may be way too much of a "lite" approach for a serious programming student, but perhaps both books can be used.