Java Generics and Collections

By Maurice Naftalin, Philip Wadler
Book Price: $34.99 USD
£24.99 GBP
PDF Price: $27.99

Cover | Table of Contents | Colophon

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Colophon

About the Authors
Maurice Naftalin is Technical Director at Morningside Light Ltd., a software consultancy in the United Kingdom. He has most recently served as an architect and mentor at NSB Retail Systems plc, and as the leader of the client development team of a major U.K. government social service system. He has taught Java since 1998 at both basic and advanced levels for Learning Tree and Sun Educational Services.

Philip Wadler is professor of theoretical computer science at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, where his research focuses on functional and logic programming. He co-authored the Generic Java standard that became the basis for generics in Sun's Java 5.0, and he also contributed to the XQuery language standard base. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie-Mellon University and co-wrote Introduction to Functional Programming (Prentice-Hall).

Colophon
The animal on the cover of Java Generics and Collections is an alligator. Alligators are found only in southern parts of the U.S. and in China. They are rare in China, native only to the Yangtze River Basin. Alligators generally cannot tolerate salt water and therefore live in freshwater ponds, swamps, and the like.

When first born, alligators are tiny, measuring only about six inches. However, it grow extremely fast in the first years of life-a foot each year. A fully grown female is usually around 9 feet and between 150 and 200 pounds, while an adult male typically reaches 11 feet and weighs about 350 to 400 pounds. The largest known alligator on record, found in Louisiana in the early 1900s, was 19 feet, 2 inches. A key identifying characteristic of an alligator's appearance is its short, broad snout. An adult alligator's skin is a gray-black color, which turns dark black when wet, and it has a white underbelly. Young alligators have yellow and white stripes across their backs. The shape of the snout and skin color provide physical characteristics that differentiate alligators from crocodiles, which have long, thin snouts and are a tan color.

Alligators are mainly nocturnal and do most of their hunting and feeding after the sun sets. They are carnivores and eat a large variety of food, such as turtles, fish, frogs, birds, snakes, small mammals, and even smaller alligators. However, once an alligator grows into adulthood, it really faces no threats-other than humans.

The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover font is Adobe ITC Garamond. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont's TheSans Mono Condensed.

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