I bought this book purely to understand how the notify()/wait() system works in Java and how I could use it for network server threads. I now have working software so for that reason alone it was a great buy!It's an easy to read book with quite good examples. However, my main issue was that I wanted a "cookbook" with ready to use and well written code samples. Instead, this book is written for people who learn sequentially by reading from the front of the book to the back. So a lot of the code samples are actually examples of code that is deficient for some reason and then the following code is an example of how the deficiency was mitigated. This isn't bad if you read the book from start to finish but if you want to dive in, grab a code snippet of something that'll work, and work well, you have to root around a bit to find the final example.