The Java Language Specification (Java Series)

Written by the inventors of the technology, The Java(tm) Language Specification, Second Edition is the definitive technical reference for the Java(tm) programming language. If you want to know the precise meaning of the language's constructs, this is the source for you. The book provides complete, accurate, and detailed coverage of the syntax and semantics of the Java programming language. It describes all aspects of the language, including the semantics of all types, statements, and expressions, as well as threads and binary compatibility

Bill Joy is founder and Vice President of Research at Sun Microsystems, where he has led the company's technical strategy, working on both hardware and software architecture. He is well known as the creator of the Berkeley version of the UNIX operating system, for which he received a lifetime achievement award from the USENIX Association in 1993. He received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1986. Joy has had a central role in shaping the Java language. Guy L. Steele Jr. is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he is responsible for the specification of the Java programming language as well as research in parallel algorithms. He is well known as the co-creator of the Scheme programming language and for his reference books for the C programming language (with Samuel Harbison) and for the Common Lisp programming language. Steele received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1988 and was named an ACM Fellow in 1994.

Gilad Bracha is Computational Theologist at Sun Microsystems, and a researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. Prior to joining Sun, he worked on Strongtalk™, the Animorphic Smalltalk System. He holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah.

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. 0201310082AB05312002