Who Should Buy This Book

If you are an experienced Java programmer, but quite new to Linux, and you have been looking for information on the tools available to develop and deploy Java applications on Linux systems, this book will provide a lot of useful information.

If you are an experienced Linux user or developer, and you are interested in using the Java language on that platform, this book will guide you through some advanced Java development topics and will present, we hope, some novel uses for familiar Linux and GNU tools.

If you are a rank beginner to either Linux or Java, we still think this book has value, but we would recommend that you use it in conjunction with more introductory books. For a basic introduction to Java and object-oriented programming, we recommend Bruce Eckel's excellent book, Thinking in Java (ISBN 0-13-100287-2). For an introduction to Linux and its tools, we can recommend The Linux Book by David Elboth (ISBN 0-13-032765-4)^[1] as an all-around title. We also list several other books in sections titled Resources throughout this book. Many books we recommend are not actually Linux-specific. Since Linux duplicates (in most respects) a UNIX platform, we do occasionally recommend books that are general to all *nix systems.

^[1] Note that we do tend to recommend titles from Pearson Education (our publishers), but that we by no means confine ourselves to that publisher.

If you are a developer, contractor, or MIS development manager with more projects than budget, our book will introduce you to many solid tools that are free of license fees for the development and deployment of production Java applications. We are all being asked to do more with less all the time. In many (but certainly not all) cases, Free and Open Source software is an excellent way to do that.