Good book to learn C/Java?

thedude36

I've recently learned a bit of the ruby language and have started a text-based game project to help me along with understanding it. The project has been going really well and I am wanting to branch off and start learning a bit of other languages. I have several friends who have studied CS and they have all expressed the value of C and Java so I thought those would be a good place to start. Could anyone recommend any good books that would help me get started? I have a functional grasp of Ruby, which, I've been told, is itself written in C and was wondering, also, if that would allow me to start with a slightly more advanced C book or if it would still be in my best interest to start from the very beginning.

jedishrfu

if you're familiar with ruby then maybe you want to ease yourself into java via groovy. groovy is a dynamic scripting language similar to ruby but which is a superset of Java. Most java snippets can be run in groovy.

http://groovy.codehaus.org/

The easiest groovy book is: Groovy Recipes by Scott Davis

For java the most thorough is Core Java by Cay Horstmann

For C the classic book (first book) by Kernighan and Ritchie is good. Orielly has a C in a Nutshell which is also very thorough but maybe too dense.