I was walking around in Borders awhile back, with the remnants of a gift card ($3 left on it, given to me by Kate (http://kate.glmotorsports.net) after she spent the bulk, but ran out of things to buy).  Came across this book and it grabbed my eye.  A little dated (what with the Java 5 and the 2006 copyright), but thought I'd give it a try since it looked like fun.  I always enjoy the books that are more full length "project tutorials" and less guides with small individual tutorials tacked on.  Unfortunately, such books are quite hard to find nowadays (although they were quite popular back in the stone ages when I started programming).

It was a couple weeks after bringing it home before I got a chance to open it, but I blew through it's 326 pages of tutorial content in 2 days.  I haven't done that with a programming book in AGES (see above commentary on book style :)  )!  It takes one from very basic entry-level Java concepts up to some fairly powerful (yet not TOO complex) concepts.  Along the way, an entire 2-d video game is built and modified.  Starts off very simple, but functional (Atari 2600 looking) very early on in the book and then it's continually refined and upgraded and eventually reaches a fairly modern looking design for a web-based/downloadable!

All in all, very impressed with this book.  I'm not much into gaming, and not too terribly interested in writing games, but I thoroughly enjoyed the book while picking up some good design concepts and additional graphics manipulation knowledge (I do occasional non-game 2-D graphics apps).  So, I'd recommend it to anyone that is in the beginning-intermediate range on Java and wants something fun to learn more, as well as anyone starting out that would like to get into the casual game market!