Learning Java, 7th Edition

Chapter 2. A First Application

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This will be the 2nd chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Before diving into our full discussion of the Java language, let’s get our feet wet with some working code and splash around a bit. In this chapter, we’ll build a friendly little application that illustrates many of the concepts used throughout the book. We’ll take this opportunity to introduce general features of the JDK.

This chapter also serves as a brief introduction to the object-oriented aspects of Java. If any of these concepts are new to you, we hope that encountering them here in Java for the first time will be a straightforward and pleasant experience. If you have worked with another object-oriented or multithreaded programming environment, you should especially appreciate Java’s simplicity and elegance. This chapter is intended only to give you a bird’s eye view of the Java language and a feel for how it is used. If you have trouble with any of the concepts introduced here, rest assured they will be covered in greater detail later in the book.

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