COM1204 Summer 2002 -- The Java language/platform

Introduction

Our textbook focuses on program development rather than the many details of the Java language itself. It rightly assumes that there are many books and online sources of information about Java. So this course page contains useful links to such Java resources, to fill the gap. When I want to know just about anything, I simply use google.com to search. It works fine for virtually any kind of question you might have about the Java language.

Books -- Hardcopy and on-line

At last count there were over sixteen hundred books (!) on the Java language, so picking out a few to suggest here is not easy!

Here's a complete on-line edition of Bruce Eckel's Thinking In Java 2nd Edition (cached on the CCS site). (Added June 29, 2001). To see the source code, as a file, if you see a reference to it such as "c02:HelloDate.java", you'll need to add the following directory and file after the tij-2nd/ path, to give, e.g., http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/futrelle/teaching/java-resources/tij-2nd/c02/HelloDate.java (I was unable to find an index page for the source code.)

• O'Reilly publishes an entire series of Java books. I use their Java in a Nutshell as a useful reference guide. About one-third of the book introduces you to the language and the other two-thirds is an API quick-reference.



• Sun Microsystems who developed the Java language publish their own series of Java books (through Addison-Wesley publishers). Ten of these books are available on-line in their entirety ( = free). Information on the books and links to the on-line versions are available here. Scroll down to the section "Learning the Java Programming Language".



• Our Snell Library has about 150 books on Java, 42 of which were published in 2000 or 2001. The great majority of them have call numbers starting with QA76.73.J38.



• Beyond these, Boston is replete with large and high-quality bookstores. Examining on-line booklists, especially when ranked by reviews or by best selling ratings, can be useful also. There's a new Barnes & Noble in the Prudential Center opening this summer, 2002. We'll see if it has a useful collection of CS books.

On-line reference materials

• A major source is Sun's Documentation and Training page.



• Sun's Java Standard Edition Platform Documentation page includes links to the APIs as well as to the on-line Java Tutorial, which has many "trails" on various topic areas.



• Marty Hall at Johns Hopkins University has assembled a huge collection of links to all sorts of Java resources. He's also the author of a well-respected Java book.

Javadoc -- Generating APIs from your comments

Javadoc is one of the Java platform utilities that will generate a collection of pages for you from your comments in your source code. The comments must be of a certain form and appear in right places for this to work. At some point in the course you will be required to generate these, so start experimenting with them now (not just reading about them). Here is the course page on Javadoc.

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