What This Book Is Not

This book will teach you the basic tools you will need to start writing technical programs in Java, but it will not cover every possible aspect of scientific or engineering programming. The book is not an exhaustive treatise on solving differential equations, integral functions, or Fourier transforms. Each of those topics is a book unto itself. This book will present the most commonly used techniques to solve those mathematical problems, but won't go into many specialized or super-advanced techniques.

The book also does not give a comprehensive description of all of the classes, methods , interfaces, and fields from the Java API. The Java libraries are enormous and a detailed look at even the Standard Edition libraries would take many hundreds of pages. This book does cover some Java API elements that are particularly relevant to technical programming. For a detailed look at the rest of the Java API, the reader is referred to the Sun Java doc pages.