This book is for computer professionals, students, technical people, and Finnish hackers. It’s for everyone who has a need for hands-on experience with the Java language with an eye toward building real applications. This book could also be considered a crash course in object-oriented programming, networking, GUIs, and XML. As you learn about Java, you’ll also learn a powerful and practical approach to software development, beginning with a deep understanding of the fundamentals of Java and its APIs.
Superficially, Java looks like C or C++, so you’ll have a tiny head start in using this book if you have some experience with one of these languages. If you do not, don’t worry. Don’t make too much of the syntactic similarities between Java and C or C++. In many respects, Java acts like more dynamic languages such as Smalltalk and Lisp. Knowledge of another object-oriented programming language should certainly help, although you may have to change some ideas and unlearn a few habits. Java is considerably simpler than languages such as C++ and Smalltalk. If you learn well from concise examples and personal experimentation, we think you’ll like this book.
The last part of this book branches out to discuss Java in the context of web applications, web services, and XML processing, so you should be familiar with the basic ideas behind web browsers, servers, and documents.
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