[jacquesm]

I just picked up my fairly dog eared K&R for that reference it's 226 pages (first edition). Yes, the C spec grew over the years, but the Java docs were huge right when it started out. I remember buying the full set and it weighed more than I could easily lift up the stairs to my office. All in all it amounted to a few thousand pages. This included the docs on the VM and a bunch of other stuff that you might not need (but which I did need).

The C standard library was a relatively small affair reflective of the way UNIX was built, a couple of well thought out interfaces combined with a lot of freedom (and enough rope to hang yourself several times over).

The Java standard library was absolutely huge and extremely hard to make headway in because each and every part of it seemed to be designed by a committee rather than by an individual (or two).