Core Java. Volume I—Fundamentals. 10 ed. C. S. Horstmann

 In late 1995, the Java programming language burst onto the Internet scene and gained instant celebrity status. The promise of Java technology was that it would become the universal glue that connects users with information wherever it comes from—web servers, databases, information providers, or any other imaginable source. Indeed, Java is in a unique position to fulfill this promise. It is an extremely solidly engineered language that has gained wide acceptance. Its built-in security and safety features are reassuring both to programmers and to the users of Java programs. Java has built-in support for advanced programming tasks, such as network programming, database connectivity, and concurrency. Since 1995, nine major revisions of the Java Development Kit have been released. Over the course of the last 20 years, the Application Programming Interface (API) has grown from about 200 to over 4,000 classes. The API now spans such diverse areas as user interface construction, database management, internationalization, security, and XML processing. The book you have in your hands is the first volume of the tenth edition of Core Java®. Each edition closely followed a release of the Java Development Kit, and each time, we rewrote the book to take advantage of the newest Java features. This edition has been updated to reflect the features of Java Standard Edition (SE) 8. As with the previous editions of this book, we still target serious programmers who want to put Java to work on real projects. We think of you, our reader, as a programmer with a solid background in a programming language other than Java, and we assume that you don’t like books filled with toy examples (such as toasters, zoo animals, or “nervous text”). You won’t find any of these in our book. Our goal is to enable you to fully understand the Java language and library, not to give you an illusion of understanding. In this book you will find lots of sample code demonstrating almost every language and library feature that we discuss. We keep the sample programs purposefully simple to focus on the major points, but, for the most part, they aren’t fake and they don’t cut corners. They should make good starting points for your own code.