Java I/O

Request for Comments

I enjoy hearing from readers, whether with general comments about how this could be a better book, specific corrections, or other topics you would like to see covered. You can reach me by sending email to [e-mail]. Please realize, however, that I receive several hundred pieces of email a day and cannot personally respond to each one.

I’m especially interested in hearing about mistakes. If you find one, I’ll post it on my web page for this book at http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/books/javaio/ and on the O’Reilly web site at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/javaio/. Before reporting errors, please check one of those pages to see if I already know about it and have posted a fix.

Let me also preempt a couple of non-errors that are often mistakenly reported. First, the signatures given in this book don’t necessarily match the signatures given in the javadoc documentation. I often change method argument names to make them clearer. For instance, Sun documents the write() method in java.io.OutputStream like this:

public void write(byte b[]) throws IOException
public void write(byte b[], int off, int len) throws IOException

I’ve rewritten that in this more intelligible form:

public void write(byte[] data) throws IOException
public void write(byte[] data, int offset, int length) throws IOException

These are exactly equivalent, however. Method argument names are purely formal and have no effect on client programmer’s code that invokes these methods. I could have rewritten them in Latin or Tuvan without really changing anything. The only difference is in their intelligibility to the reader.