Chapter 2
It’s Java!
In This Chapter
How computers, phones, and other devices run Java programs
The parts of a typical Java program
Before I became an Android guy, I was a Java guy. A Java guy is a person who revels in the workings of Java programs. I wrote Java programs, read about Java programs, went to Java user group meetings, and wore Java T-shirts. That’s why I was thrilled to learn that Android’s application programming language is Java.
In the early 1990s, James Gosling at Sun Microsystems created Java. He used ideas from many programming language traditions, including the object-oriented concepts in C++. He created an elegant platform with a wide range of uses. In mid-2014 (which is “now” as far as my chapter-writing goes), Java runs on 88 percent of all desktop computers in the United States, and on 97 percent of all enterprise desktops, with nine million Java developers worldwide.* Do you have a Blu-ray player? Under the hood, your player runs Java.
In this minibook (Book II), this chapter and Chapters 3 and 4 introduce the ins and outs of the Java programming language. But these chapters don’t offer a comprehensive guide to Java. (To badly paraphrase Geoffrey Chaucer, “This book never yet no complete not Java coverage.”) Instead, these chapters hit the highlights of ...
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