Jean-Pierre Norguet's Review

Jean-Pierre Norguet's review of Ken Arnold, James Gosling, and D. Holmes's book "The Java Programming Language"

Book reviewed: Ken Arnold, James Gosling, D. Holmes, The Java Programming Language, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2005. Review published with Amazon Reviews [http://www.amazon.com].

Review

The reference book of the Java programming language

This book presents the basics of the Java programming language. The Java programming language is object oriented, and its syntax has been inspired from the C and C++ programming languages [1, 2]. An important distinction must be made between the different parts of what is traditionally referred to as Java. Java is made of four parts: Java the programming language [3], Java the virtual machine [4], Java the standard set of libraries [5], and Java the specifications [6, 7]. This book is only about the Java programming language.

The Java language basics covered in this book include classes and objects, fields, constants, constructors, methods, parameters, variables, arrays, strings, character sets, comments, garbage collection and memory management, inheritance, access controls, method overloading, interfaces, exceptions, packages, object cloning, primitive data types and their wrapper objects, type conversion, literals, arithmetic and conditional operators, statements and blocks, multithreading, file and network input/output streams, collections, observables, date and time, randomization, string tokenization, system properties, system calls, security, mathematics, and Java-to-C/C++ mapping. This book establishes as a comprehensive coverage of the Java programming language essentials.

The authors of this book are also the co-founders of the Java language. Therefore, their authorship makes the book a de facto reference. Nevertheless, the discourse register hesitates between authoritative descriptions and the will to explain. The latter inclination of the register makes the content easier to understand, although the book cannot be considered as a tutorial. Simple examples illustrate the concepts presented, and a few exercises are progressively proposed with the reading. This unexpected combination of authority and pedagogy makes the book a valuable contribution to any computer scientist willing to learn the Java language from an authoritative reference. Beginners should however consider reading a dedicated tutorial book [8].

[1] L. H. Miller, A. E. Quilici, The Joy of C.
[2] B. Stroustrup, The C++ Programming Language.
[3] B. Joy et al., Java Language Specification.
[4] T. Lindholm, F. Yellin, The Virtual Machine Specification.
[5] P. Chan, The Java Developers Almanac.
[6] Sun Microsystems, API Specifications.
[7] The Java Community Process Program, Java Specification Requests.
[8] M. Campione, K. Walrath, The Java Tutorial.

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