| Welcome to Java How to Program, Fourth Edition and the exciting world of programming with the Java™ 2 Platform, Standard Edition. This book is by an old guy and a young guy. The old guy (HMD; Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1967) has been programming and/or teaching programming for 40 years. The young guy (PJD; MIT 1991) has been programming and/or teaching programming for 22 years, and is both a Sun Certified Java Programmer and a Sun Certified Java Developer. The old guy programs and teaches from experience; the young guy does so from an inexhaustible reserve of energy. The old guy wants clarity; the young guy wants performance. The old guy seeks elegance and beauty; the young guy wants results. We got together to produce a book we hope you will find informative, challenging and entertaining.
In November 1995, we attended an Internet/World Wide Web conference in Boston to hear about Java. A Sun Microsystems representative spoke on Java in a packed convention ballroom. During that presentation, we saw the future of programming unfold. The first edition of Java How to Program was born at that moment and was published as the world’s first Java computer science textbook.
The world of Java is evolving so rapidly that Java How to Program: Fourth Edition is being published less than five years after the first edition. This creates tremendous challenges and opportunities for us as authors, for our publisher—Prentice Hall, for instructors, for students and for professional people.
Before Java appeared, we were convinced that C++ would replace C as the dominant application development language and systems programming language for the next decade. However, the combination of the World Wide Web and Java now increases the prominence of the Internet in information systems strategic planning and implementation. Organizations want to integrate the Internet “seamlessly” into their information systems. Java is more appropriate than C++ for this purpose. |
