What are some recommended books for learning C, Java, and Groovy as a beginner?

[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.