Java Cookbook

Acknowledgments

My life has been touched many times by the flow of the fates bringing me into contact with the right person to show me the right thing at the right time. Steve Munroe, with whom I’ve long since lost touch, introduced me to computers -- in particular an IBM 360/30 at the Toronto Board of Education that was bigger than a living room, had 32 or 64K of memory, and had perhaps the power of a PC/XT -- in 1970. (Are you out there somewhere, Steve?) Herb Kugel took me under his wing at the University of Toronto while I was learning about the larger IBM mainframes that came later. Terry Wood and Dennis Smith at the University of Toronto introduced me to mini- and micro-computers before there was an IBM PC. On evenings and weekends, the Toronto Business Club of Toastmasters International (http://www.toastmasters.org) and Al Lambert’s Canada SCUBA School allowed me to develop my public speaking and instructional abilities. Several people at the University of Toronto, but especially Geoffrey Collyer, taught me the features and benefits of the Unix operating system at a time when I was ready to learn it.

Greg Davidson of UCSD taught the first Learning Tree course I attended, and welcomed me as a Learning Tree instructor. Years later, when the Oak language was about to be released on Sun’s web site, Greg encouraged me to write to James Gosling and find out about it. James’s reply of March 29th, 1995, that the lawyers had made them rename the language to Java and that it was “just ...