Preface
If you know a little Java™, great. If you know more Java, even better! This book is ideal for anyone who knows some Java and wants to learn more.
I started programming in C in 1980 while working at the University of Toronto, and C served me quite well through the 1980s and into the 1990s. In 1995, as the nascent language Oak was being renamed Java, I had the good fortune to be told about it by my colleague J. Greg Davidson. I sent an email to the address Greg provided, and got this mail back:
From scndprsn.Eng.Sun.COM!jag Wed Mar 29 19:43:54 1995 Date: Wed, 29 Mar 1995 16:47:51 +0800 From: jag@scndprsn.Eng.Sun.COM (James Gosling) To: ian@scooter.Canada.Sun.COM, ian@darwinsys.com Subject: Re: WebRunner Cc: goltz@sunne.East.Sun.COM Content-Length: 361 Status: RO X-Lines: 9 > Hi. A friend told me about WebRunner(?), your extensible network > browser. It and Oak(?) its extention language, sounded neat. Can > you please tell me if it's available for play yet, and/or if any > papers on it are available for FTP? Check out http://java.sun.com (oak got renamed to java and webrunner got renamed to hotjava to keep the lawyers happy)
I downloaded HotJava and began to play with it. At first I
wasn’t sure about this newfangled language, which looked like a
mangled C/C++. I wrote test and demo programs, sticking them a few at
a time into a directory that I called javasrc to keep it separate from my C source (as often the programs would have the same name). And as I learned more about Java, ...