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Appendix A:
What Is Java?
This appendix presents an overview of Java. An experienced Java programmer can safely skip
this section. For readers who are inexperienced with Java, reading this section should help to
understand the Java concepts and code snippets used throughout this book, as well as to make
simple adaptations.
Java is an object-oriented programming language, introduced in 1995. Its main strength when
compared with other object-oriented languages of its time (C++ being the most important) was its
portability: Java was designed to be architecture-neutral so that Java programs written on a Mac,
for example, would look and behave exactly in the same way as on Windows, Linux, and any
other platform that supports the Java specication. ...