CHAPTER 25 An Overview of Java

Java is a powerful object-oriented programming language, developed at Sun Microsystems in the mid 1990s. One of its primary strengths is that it enables you to develop programs that are platform independent, meaning that they can be run on any system that supports Java. This includes Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, all major versions of UNIX (including Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD), and various other systems. At the time of this writing, Sun has recently announced plans to make Java open source. This is likely to encourage more system distributions to include Java components by default, making Java even more easily portable.

In general, Java is very similar to C++, but it is easier to use, sometimes at the cost of performance. ...

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