September 2015
Intermediate to advanced
30 pages
1h 17m
English
Content preview from Java: The Legend
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 2. The Java Language
In this chapter, I’ll discuss the Java language, its evolution, and its status after 20 years in the field. As you’ll see, the language has withstood the test of time pretty well.
Primary Java Language Design Goals
Java has a number of design goals that have formed part of the platform since the earliest days.
Backwards Compatibility
The Java platform has always been very concerned with backwards compatibility. This means that code which was written (or even compiled) for an earlier version of the platform must continue to keep working with later releases of the platform.
This principle allows development groups to have a high degree of confidence that an upgrade of their JDK or JRE will not break currently working applications. The platform has been very successful in achieving this and code written for Java 1.0 will still compile 20 years later on a Java 8 installation without modification (in fact, compatibility is even stronger than that, as you’ll see in the next chapter).
Backwards compatibility is a great strength of the Java language and platform, but in order to achieve it some necessary constraints are required. You’ll meet a good example of this presently, and see in detail how it impacted the evolution of the most recent version, Java SE 8.
Easy to Learn and Read
Java’s approach to code is that it should be easy to read, in accordance with the well-known principle that code is read more often than it is written.
Java feels very familiar ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.