Java By Comparison

Get Ready for Your Mission to Mars

As a beginner or intermediate programmer, getting a sense for good and clean code that others will recognize as such might appear to you as something far, far away, a goal almost unreachable—a long journey, full of unexpected problems and unknown experiences. It’s a bit like traveling through space to a destination that humanity hasn’t reached yet: a journey to Mars! That was sort of how we felt when we started to learn programming many years ago.

We’ve written the code in this book with the theme of a Mars mission, so all the code examples have something spacey about them. But the real reason is that we don’t want to distract you from the problem in a code snippet with the setting that the code is in. We used ...