When you get a vacation that spans almost upto 3 months , techniques to while away your time become an absolute necessity .Thankfully I came across two brilliant websites which has helped me a lot in this regard. One of them is called Project Euler. It is a wonderful site which has a series of over 300 mathematical problems to solve-but the catch is that they are not just plain puzzles, they require programming skills to solve most of the problems.After solving each problem, you verify your answer in their site and they keep on ungrading your levels accordingly.For all my hopelessly bored mathematically inclined  friends this may turn out to your perfect time-pass, and at the same time give your brain a serious workout .

And for all the hacker wannabes, HackThisSite.org is your ultimate tutor. This site is a free and safe training ground to begin your hacking journey! I guess the best part of it is the community you get to join and thus learn tons of useful information through their forums and articles and more importantly people who will help clear your doubts and hiccups. For the absolute beginners there are 10 basic level missions and then as you improve you are exposed to higher and more interesting challenges.Hope you try out both of these sites and in the meanwhile comment about more interesting sites you know. Have fun!

If you are a person who prefers boring dry lectures over stimulating conversations with witty friends then this book is definitely NOT for you. For all the others, welcome to paradise-Head First Java by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates! This is one programming book you will enjoy reading with all its funny images and captions it may seem to be a joke book, but mind you this book really know what its trying to achieve- make sure its readers learn Java.

Even after its light hearted handling of the subject, it manages to cover quite a wide range of features in Java and  it does all that after clearing the basics like OOP very thoroughly using several analogies which make it so much easier to learn.

Here are some of the other Java features covered by this book-

• Creating graphical user interfaces(using Swing)

• Creating network applications(like creating a chat client and server)

• Exception handling and Threads

• Deploying your aplication using RMI or Java Web Server
  

But what I loved the most about this book was the “There are no dumb questions” sections after every chapter which somehow managed to answer all the questions popping up in my mind. Apart from that they also have mock interviews , mystery stories which helps to explore the same topic in several different ways .Also the exercises in this book are designed to be part of the reading process itself with interesting crosswords and true/false questions. Thus unlike in other books, you wont get a chance to feel guilty over not solving gigantic exercises :-) .But after all this, I believe if you have not had any programming experience before this might not be the perfect book for you .So in short if you wanna learn java then go got it here, besides its comparatively cheaper too.

Plus if you want to download the code used in this book you could download it from the wickedlysmart.com , for the lazy readers here is the link. 

PS: Thank you Vinay Kini for introducing this book to me!

PPS: This is my first post..Welcome my readers..Hope we make this a learning spot to share knowledge!