To the Reader

The book you have in your hands is the second volume of the seventh edition of Core Java 2. The first volume covers the essential features of the language; this volume covers the advanced topics that a programmer will need to know for professional software development. Thus, as with the first volume and the previous editions of this book, we still are targeting programmers who want to put Java technology to work on real projects.

Please note: If you are an experienced developer who is comfortable with advanced language features such as inner classes and generics, you need not have read the first volume in order to benefit from this volume. (While we do refer to sections of the previous volume when appropriate and, of course, hope you will buy or have bought Volume 1, you can find the needed background material in any comprehensive introductory book about the Java platform.)

Finally, when any book is being written, errors and inaccuracies are inevitable. We would very much like to hear about them. Of course, we would prefer to hear about them only once. For this reason, we have put up a web site at http://horstmann.com/corejava.html with an FAQ, bug fixes, and workarounds. Strategically placed at the end of the bug report web page (to encourage you to read the previous reports) is a form that you can use to report bugs or problems and to send suggestions for improvements to future editions.