How This Book Is Organized

This book is organized into six parts . Each part covers a significant number of related topics that have been organized to build your knowledge of the Java language as you progress through the book.

Part I, "The Java Language," teaches you the syntax of Java and how to build correctly formed classes and interfaces. The fundamental aspects of Java are found in its language syntax. Every program is built using the fundamentals of the language, and this part walks you through each segment. For the beginner, each of the chapters has been structured to help you become familiar with Java programming. For the expert, the individual aspects of the language are explored in great detail, making Part I a great reference as well as a learning tool. This part concludes with more advanced discussions of the Java collections framework and the language's built-in support for multi-threaded applications.

Part II, "User Interface," teaches you the details of building a graphical user interface in Java, from both the AWT and Swing perspectives. In addition to exploring these Java Foundation Classes (JFC) APIs, Part II explores the JFC accessibility, Java 2D, and Drag and Drop APIs. Furthermore, because of its closeness to the JFC, the Java Media Framework is explored in Part II.

Part III, "I/O," walks you through reading and writing data from your Java applications. The part begins by teaching you the fundamental components and techniques of streaming and reading files. Then you learn how to use Java's serialization for sending and retrieving whole Java objects. This part concludes with the information needed to build networked applications using Java and to build applications for international use.

Part IV, "Databases," provides the details of one of the most important aspects of building modern business applications. Databases are the core to almost all business applications, and Java's JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) eases the burden of communicating between your Java applications and the database. In this part, you are introduced to how Java allows you to access and use databases to develop powerful and portable applications in a short amount of time. Welcome to the world of platform-independent and DBMS-independent systems!

Part V, "Component Development," shows you how to make the development cycle faster and easier. Component-based development has been around for many years now, but it has never been as easy to do as with Java. In this part, you learn how to use JavaBeans, which is Java's platform-independent component model. This section is preceded by coverage of the Reflection API, which supports JavaBeans and any other class discovery that you may need to perform at runtime in a Java application.

The appendixes give you the detailed instructions you need to get up and running with a Java development environment and start writing your own programs. Refer to the appendixes when you begin the early examples if you have any difficulty compiling and running your code. This part also covers the performance enhancements introduced in SDK 1.3 and provides you with a list of resources you can explore to learn even more about Java.