Chapter 12. New Date and Time API

This chapter covers

  • Why we needed a new date and time library in Java 8
  • Representing date and time for both humans and machines
  • Defining an amount of time
  • Manipulating, formatting, and parsing dates
  • Dealing with different time zones and calendars

The Java API includes many useful components to help you build complex applications. Unfortunately, the Java API isn’t always perfect. We believe the majority of experienced Java developers will agree that date and time support before Java 8 was far from ideal. Don’t worry, though; Java 8 introduces a brand new Date and Time API to tackle this issue.

In Java 1.0 the only support for date and time was the java.util.Date class. Despite its name, this class doesn’t ...

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