Java I/O

Preface

In many ways this book is a prequel to my previous book, Java Network Programming (O’Reilly & Associates). When writing that book, I more or less assumed that readers were familiar with basic input and output in Java™—that they knew how to use input streams and output streams, convert bytes to characters, connect filter streams to each other, and so forth.

However, after that book was published, I began to notice that a lot of the questions I got from readers of the book and students in my classes weren’t so much about network programming itself as they were about input and output (I/O in programmer vernacular). When Java 1.1 was released with a vastly expanded java.io package and many new I/O classes spread out across the rest of the class library, it became obvious that a book that specifically addressed I/O was required. This is that book.

Java I/O endeavors to show you how to really use Java’s I/O classes, allowing you to quickly and easily write programs that accomplish many common tasks. Some of these include:

• Reading and writing files

• Communicating over network connections

• Filtering data

• Interpreting a wide variety of formats for integer and floating-point numbers

• Passing data between threads

• Encrypting and decrypting data

• Calculating digital signatures for streams

• Compressing and decompressing data

• Writing objects to streams

• Copying, moving, renaming, and getting information about files and directories

• Letting users choose files from a GUI interface

• Reading and writing ...