Java Programming Language - Softcover

Arnold, Ken

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201704331 ISBN 13: 9780201704334

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 2000

Synopsis

Direct from the creators of the Java(tm) programming language, this Third Edition of The Java(tm) Programming Language is a valuable resource for both novice and advanced programmers. More than 100,000 developers who programmed with C, C++, Smalltalk, or other high-level languages have used this book to get a concise, intelligent, and deep understanding of the Java programming language. This book is what you need to understand the basic design goals of the language and the application of the language in real-world development. It provides unique insights into why and how the language was designed and intended to be used. The authors describe the latest version of the language, as defined in the Java(tm) Language Specification, Second Edition and implemented in version 1.3 of the Java 2 SDK, Standard Edition. This third edition has been structured to give more in-depth treatment of the newer language features, as well as informative examples on using some of the new APIs. New and/or revised in this edition: more details on language features, including an expanded section on nested classes more comprehensive treatment of garbage collection and related programming issues coverage of new APIs, such as collections and internationalization Thoroughly revised from start to finish, this edition fully covers the features of the current release of the Java programming language and class libraries. The book serves as a tutorial introduction to the language and essential libraries as well as a reference. Experienced programmers will find this new edition to be a valuable reference, and will gain new insights into the subtleties of the language. Novice and intermediate programmers will benefit from the valuable examples and clear explanations of language and library features. Make sure you understand the contents of this book before you begin any serious development for the Java platform.

About this title

About the Author

Ken Arnold of Sun Microsystems is one of the original architects of Jini technology and the original lead architect of JavaSpaces technology. He is a leading expert in object-oriented design, C, C++, and distributed computing. He also has a checkered past involving University of California-Berkeley, rogue, curses, and other things too embarrassing to mention.

James Gosling is a Fellow and Vice President at Sun Microsystems, the creator of the Java programming language, and one of the computer industry's most noted programmers. He is the 1996 recipient of Software Development's "Programming Excellence Award." He previously developed NeWS, Sun's network-extensible window system, and was a principal in the Andrew project at Carnegie-Mellon University, from which he holds a PhD in Computer Science. David Holmes is a Senior Research Scientist at the Cooperative Research Centre for Enterprise Distributed Systems Technology (DSTC Pty Ltd), located in Brisbane, Australia. His work with Java technology has focused on concurrency and synchronization support in the language and virtual machine. He has presented tutorials on concurrency and design at numerous international object-oriented programming conferences. He completed his PhD at Macquarie University, Sydney, in 1999. 0201704331AB05312002

From the Back Cover

Direct from the creators of the Java™ programming language, this Third Edition of The Java™ Programming Language is a valuable resource for both novice and advanced programmers. More than 100,000 developers who programmed with C, C++, Smalltalk, or other high-level languages have used this book to get a concise, intelligent, and deep understanding of the Java programming language.

This book is what you need to understand the basic design goals of the language and the application of the language in real-world development. It provides unique insights into why and how the language was designed and intended to be used.

The authors describe the latest version of the language, as defined in the Java™ Language Specification, Second Edition and implemented in version 1.3 of the Java 2 SDK, Standard Edition. This third edition has been structured to give more in-depth treatment of the newer language features, as well as informative examples on using some of the new APIs.

New and/or revised in this edition:

• more details on language features, including an expanded section on nested classes
• more comprehensive treatment of garbage collection and related programming issues
• coverage of new APIs, such as collections and internationalization

Thoroughly revised from start to finish, this edition fully covers the features of the current release of the Java programming language and class libraries. The book serves as a tutorial introduction to the language and essential libraries as well as a reference.

Experienced programmers will find this new edition to be a valuable reference, and will gain new insights into the subtleties of the language. Novice and intermediate programmers will benefit from the valuable examples and clear explanations of language and library features. Make sure you understand the contents of this book before you begin any serious development for the Java platform.

0201704331B04062001

From the Inside Flap

Beautiful buildings are more than scientific. They are true organisms, spiritually conceived; works of art, using the best technology by inspiration rather than the idiosyncrasies of mere taste or any averaging by the committee mind.
Frank Lloyd Wright

The Java™ programming language has been warmly received by the world com munity of software developers and Internet content providers. Users of the Inter net and World Wide Web benefit from access to secure, platform-independent applications that can come from anywhere on the Internet. Software developers who create applications in the Java programming language benefit by developing code only once, with no need to "port" their applications to every software and hardware platform.

For many, the language was known first as a tool to create applets for the World Wide Web. An applet is a mini-application that runs inside a Web page. An applet can perform tasks and interact with users on their browser pages without using resources from the Web server after being downloaded. Some applets may, of course, talk with the server to do their job, but that's their business. The Java programming language is indeed valuable for distributed network environments like the Web. However, it goes well beyond this domain to provide a powerful general-purpose programming language suitable for building a variety of applications that either do not depend on network features, or want them for dif ferent reasons. The ability to execute downloaded code on remote hosts in a secure manner is a critical requirement for many organizations.

Other groups use it as a general-purpose programming language for projects in which machine independence is less important. Ease of programming and safety features help you quickly produce working code. Some common program ming errors never occur because of features like garbage collection and type-safe references. Support for multithreading caters to modern network-based and graph ical user interface--based applications that must attend to multiple tasks simulta neously, and the mechanisms of exception handling ease the task of dealing with error conditions. While the built-in tools are powerful, it is a simple language in which programmers can quickly become proficient.

The Java programming language is designed for maximum portability with as few implementation dependencies as possible. An int, for example, is a 32-bit signed two's-complement integer in all implementations, irrespective of the CPU architecture on which the program executes. Defining everything possible about the language and its runtime environment enables users to run compiled code any where and share code with anyone who has a Java runtime environment.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

This book teaches the Java programming language to people who are familiar with basic programming concepts. It explains the language without being ardu ously formal or complete. This book is not an introduction to object-oriented pro gramming, although some issues are covered to establish a common terminology. Other books in this series, and much online documentation, focus on applets, graphical interfaces, databases, components, and other specific kinds of program ming tasks. For other references, see "Further Reading" on page 563.

This third edition includes the changes introduced in the Java 2 Platform, such as the new strictfp keyword, collection classes, and reference objects, as imple mented in the Java 2 SDK, Standard Edition Version 1.3 (sometimes colloquially referred to as JDK 1.3 or simply 1.3). You will also find brief coverage of the other main packages. If you have already read the second edition, you will find that much of the information in this edition has been restructured to improve the presentation of language features---such as nested classes and interfaces---and class API's. This edition will give you a lot of new information, but since most of the language is unchanged, and almost all main package types are still usable, you will want to pay most attention to the newer areas.

The Java programming language shares many features common to most pro gramming 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" tutorial---no 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.

Chapter 1---A Quick Tour---gives a quick overview of the language. Program mers 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.

Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 cover the object-oriented core features of the language, namely, class declarations that define components of a program, and objects man ufactured according to class definitions. Chapter 2---Classes and Objects-- describes the basis of the language: classes. Chapter 3---Extending Classes-- describes how an existing class can be extended,orsubclassed, to create a new class with additional data and behavior. Chapter 4---Interfaces---describes how to declare interface types which are abstract descriptions of behavior that provide maximum flexibility for class designers and implementors. Chapter 5---Nested Classes and Interfaces---describes how classes and interfaces can be declared inside other classes and interfaces, and the benefits that provides.

Chapters 6 and 7 cover standard constructs common to most languages. Chap ter 6---Tokens, Operators, and Expressions---describes the tokens of the language from which statements are constructed, how the tokens and operators are used to build expressions, and how expressions are evaluated. Chapter 7---Control Flow---describes how control statements direct the order of statement execution. Chapter 8---Exceptions---describes the language's powerful error-handling capabilities. Chapter 9---Strings---describes the built-in language and runtime support for String objects.

Chapter 10---Threads---explains the language's view of multithreading. Many applications, such as graphical interface--based software, must attend to multiple tasks simultaneously. These tasks must cooperate to behave correctly, and threads meet the needs of cooperative multitasking.

Chapter 11---Programming with Types---describes the type-related classes: individual objects that describe each class and interface, and classes that wrap primitive data types such as integers and floating-point values into their own object types.

Chapter 12---Garbage Collection and Memory---talks about garbage collec tion, finalization, and lower-strength reference objects.

Chapter 13---Packages---describes how you can group collections of classes and interfaces into separate packages.

Chapter 14---Documentation Comments---shows how to write reference doc umentation in comments.

Chapters 15 through 19 cover the main packages. Chapter 15---The I/O Pack age---describes the input/output system, which is based on streams. Chapter 16-- Collections---covers the collection or container classes such as sets and lists.

Chapter 17---Miscellaneous Utilities---covers the rest of the utility classes such as bit sets and random number generation. Chapter 18---System Programming-- leads you through the system classes that provide access to features of the under lying platform. Chapter 19---Internationalization and Localization---covers some of the tools used to create programs that can run in many linguistic and cultural environments.

Chapter 20---Standard Packages---briefly explores the packages that are part of the standard platform, giving overviews of those packages not covered in more detail in this book.

Appendix A---Runtime Exceptions---lists all the runtime exceptions and errors that the runtime system itself can throw.

Appendix B---Useful Tables---has tables of information that you may find useful for quick reference.

Finally, Further Reading lists works that may be interesting for further read ing on complete details, object orientation, programming with threads, software design, and other topics.

EXAMPLES AND DOCUMENTATION All the code examples in the text have been compiled and run on the latest version of the language available at the time the book was written, which was the Java 2 SDK, Standard Edition, Version 1.3. Only supported features are covered---depre cated types, methods, and fields are ignored except where unavoidable. We have also covered issues beyond writing programs that simply compile. Part of learning a language is to learn to use it well. For this reason, we have tried to show princi ples of good programming style and design.

In a few places we refer to online documentation. Development environments provide a way to automatically generate documentation (usually HTML docu ments) from a compile

Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0201704331
• ISBN 13: 9780201704334
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 595