Preface
This is yet another book about the Java Programming Language and the Java Programming Environment. As one of the most popular programming languages in use today, Java has already been the subject of a lot of books. On the day this sentence was written, a search on Amazon for books about “Java programming” returned 11,978 results. So why does there need to be another?
The premise of this book is that Java, after some 15 years of development, has become a large and rather complex language and environment. The language itself has seen considerable growth since the time it was introduced. The libraries associated with the language have grown even more, and the requirements of upward compatibility have meant that while many things have been added, very little has been taken away. The curse of any major piece of software is that to survive, it must become popular, but in becoming popular, the software is required not to change in such a way that it would break things that depend upon it. This would be fine if software could be made perfect from the start, but it doesn’t work that way. All software is an attempt to get things right, and each attempt is more or less successful. Even if a piece of software were perfect when it was first released, users would find new ways to use that software (or the environment in which it was used would change) so that it would not remain perfect. So we (the programmers) try to make the software better, which means that we add things, which means ...