Java 2D Graphics
Jonathan Knudsen is, acknowledges the back blurb, an O'Reilly staff writer. That means he's not a subject expert, but what is technically termed a 'hack' who writes about whatever subject O'Reilly needs a book. That's not to say that he doesn't know his subject, but his book on Java Cryptography wasn't all that good and at first I thought that the book on Java 2D graphics wasn't up to scratch either.
When I read the book from front to back, only omitting the silly how-to-read-this-book-manual at the front, and the bits on fonts and text in the middle (I wasn't interested in those; I was interested in a clear description of a paint and pixel-mess API), I discovered that this is a pretty useful book.
Note that I had a Purpose in reading this book: I wanted a different, more object-oriented, perspective on a 2D API than Qt's QPainter/QPaintDevice combo for Krita. I've investigated ImageMagick, Magic++, Libart — but this was the only description in book-form available to me. And it helped me a lot. A particular gem is the description of an image as a spatial function on page 215 (your pagenumber may differ, I used the first edition). Good stuff, too, is the PNG decoder.
However, I wouldn't know how useful this book would be to someone who wanted to have a go at 2D Java programming, but my guess is: pretty useful.