Addison.Wesley.The.Java.Programming.Language.4th.Edition.Aug.200...

This book teaches the Java programming language to people who are familiar with basic programming concepts. It explains the language without being arduously formal or complete. This book is not an introduction to object-oriented programming, although some issues are covered to establish a common terminology. Other books in this series and much online documentation focus on applets, graphical interfaces, Web sites, databases, components, and other specific kinds of programming tasks. For other references, see "Further Reading" on page 755.<br><br>This fourth edition provides integrated coverage of the Java programming language as provided by the Java™ 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 and specified by the Java™ Language Specification, Third Edition. It also covers most of the classes in the main packages (java.lang, java.util, java.io) as implemented in the J2SE™ Development Kit 5.0 (more commonly known as JDK 5.0, or in the older nomenclature JDK 1.5.0).<br><br>If you have already read the third edition of this book, you will find some major changes, both in the language and the book, since the 1.3 release that the third edition covered. There are new chapters on generics, enums, and annotationsthe major new language features introduced in the 5.0 releaseand major new sections on assertions and regular expressions. Some existing material has been restructured to accommodate other changes and to improve the general flow of the textsuch as introducing the new boxing and unboxing conversions. But every single chapter has been updated in some way, whether it is a new language feature like variable argument methods; the new enhanced for loop construct; a new class such as Formatter for formatting text output; or changes to classes and methods caused by the addition of generics (such as the collections utilities and the reflection classes)change permeates this entire fourth edition.<br><br>The Java programming language shares many features common to most programming languages in use today. The language should look familiar to C and C++ programmers because it was designed with C and C++ constructs where the languages are similar. That said, this book is neither a comparative analysis nor a "bridge" tutorialno knowledge of C or C++ is assumed. C++ programmers, especially, may be as hindered by what they must unlearn as they are helped by their knowledge.<br><br>Chapter 1A Quick Tourgives a quick overview of the language. Programmers who are unfamiliar with object-oriented programming notions should read the quick tour, while programmers who are already familiar with object-oriented programming paradigms will find the quick tour a useful introduction to the object-oriented features of the language. The quick tour introduces some of the basic language features on which examples through the rest of the book are built.<br><br>Chapters 2 through 6 cover the object-oriented core features of the language, namely, class declarations that define components of a program, and objects manufactured according to class definitions. Chapter 2Classes and Objectsdescribes the basis of the language: classes. Chapter 3Extending Classesdescribes how an existing class can be extended, or subclassed, to create a new class with additional data and behavior. Chapter 4Interfacesdescribes how to declare interface types that are abstract descriptions of behavior that provide maximum flexibility for class designers and implementors. Chapter 5Nested Classes and Interfacesdescribes how classes and interfaces can be declared inside other classes and interfaces, and the benefits that provides. Finally, Chapter 6Enumeration Typescovers the definition and use of type-safe enumeration constants.<br><br>Chapters 7 through 10 cover standard constructs common to most languages. Chapter 7Tokens, Values, and Variablesdescribes the tokens of the language from which statements are constructed, the types defined by the language and their allowed values, and the variables that store data in objects, arrays, or locally within methods. Chapter 8Primitives as Typesexplores the relationship between the primitive types and objects of their corresponding wrapper classes, and how boxing and unboxing can transparently convert between them. Chapter 9Operators and Expressionsdescribes the basic operators of the language, how these operators are used to build expressions, and how expressions are evaluated. Chapter 10Control Flowdescribes how control statements direct the order of statement execution.<br><br>Chapter 11Generic Typesdescribes generic types: how they are written and used, their power, and their limitations.<br><br>Chapter 12Exceptions and Assertionsdescribes the language's powerful error-handling capabilities, and the use of assertions to validate the expected behavior of code.<br><br>Chapter 13Strings and Regular Expressionsdescribes the built-in language and runtime support for String objects, the underlying character set support, and the powerful utilities for regular expression matching.<br><br>Chapter 14Threadsexplains the language's view of multithreading. Many applications, such as graphical interfacebased software, must attend to multiple tasks simultaneously. These tasks must cooperate to behave correctly, and threads meet the needs of cooperative multitasking.<br><br>Chapter 15Annotationsdescribes the annotation types used to document some of the extra-linguistic properties of classes and method.<br><br>Chapter 16Reflectiondescribes the runtime type introspection mechanism and how you can construct and manipulate objects of unknown type dynamically at runtime.<br><br>Chapter 17Garbage Collection and Memorytalks about garbage collection, finalization, and lower-strength reference objects.<br><br>Chapter 18Packagesdescribes how you can group collections of classes and interfaces into separate packages.<br><br>Chapter 19Documentation Commentsshows how to write reference documentation in comments.<br><br>Chapters 20 through 24 cover the main packages. Chapter 20The I/O Packagedescribes the input/output system, which is based on streams. Chapter 21Collectionscovers the collection or container classes such as sets and lists. Chapter 22Miscellaneous Utilitiescovers the rest of the utility classes such as bit sets, formatted output, text scanning, and random number generation. Chapter 23System Programmingleads you through the system classes that provide access to features of the underlying platform. Chapter 24Internationalization and Localizationcovers some of the tools used to create programs that can run in many linguistic and cultural environments.<br><br>Chapter 25Standard Packagesbriefly explores the packages that are part of the standard platform, giving overviews of those packages not covered in more detail in this book.<br><br>Appendix AApplication Evolutionlooks at some of the issues involved in dealing with the evolution of applications and the Java platform, and the impact this has on some of the new language features.<br><br>Appendix BUseful Tableshas tables of information that you may find useful for quick reference.<br><br>Finally, Further Reading lists works that may be interesting for further reading on complete details, object orientation, programming with threads, software design, and other topics.<br><br>