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Java has arrived at the basis training of computer programming. This cross-platform language has been developed by Sun Microsystems only a few years ago. To support my job as a professor for computer science at a technical college, in the last two years I read a lot of books about Java. Unfortunately most of them only make weak demands on didactics and only are usable for the training of advanced programmers. The book from Lewis and Loftus is an exception. In a very clear manner and always with the beginners in mind, the book combines the basis of a modern object oriented software development with an introduction to programming with the Java language. Among other things classical and well known algorithms of the basics of computer science like searching, sorting and working with linked lists are developed and implemented completely in Java. For all that the clarity of the representation takes precedence of the completeness of the language description. I see it very positive that Classes and Objects are not put on other concepts but are used independently and as basic elements of software design. In my opinion a modern education in computer programming should be realized in exactly that way. The book has 857 pages. The last 300 ones form an extensive appendix with a lot of supplements and summaries. Among others to support the integration of Java Applets in HTML pages (Hyper Text Markup Language, the language of the World Wide Web) it contains a small but useful HTML tutorial. THe essential part of the text is divided in 16 chapters. It discusses commandline and character oriented Java programms (so-called Java Applications) as well as Internet (Web) based Java programs (so-called Java Applets) with their graphical circumstances. At the end of each chapter there are a summary of key concepts, some self-review questions, some exercises and programming projects and the answers to the self-review questions. It's really a very solid and consequently designed book. The text deals with Java version 1.1 and uses the Java Development Kit (JDK) of Sun Microsystems which all over the world serves as a reference installation for Java. The book is written for beginners, so it's no surprise that advanced concepts like Java-Beans, JDBC (Java DataBase Connectivity) and graphical stand-alone programs has not been treated. I can highly recommend this book for all starters in programming, in object-oriented software design and in programming with the Java language.