COM1370 Summer 2002 -- The Java language/platform

Introduction

This course page contains useful links to Java resources. 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, 2002). There's source code in the book at various places, but to see the source code as a file, wehn 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 and there are no links to it from the book, it seems.)

Eckel's book is a quite popular one, and among other things, has color-coded source code and snippets, e.g., frame.setVisible(true); which makes it a pleasure to read. You can download the entire book free from many places if you want your own copy of it (7MB unzipped).

• 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.



• Our Snell Library (Telnet to catalog) has about 150 books on Java, 42 of which were published in 2000 or 2002. 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.

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.

Java graphics and Applets

• See our course page on applets and Java graphics.

Javadoc -- Generating APIs from your comments

• Javadoc is a Java platform utility that will generate a collection of pages for you from comments in your source code. The comments must be of a certain form and appear in right places for this to work. Here is the COM1370 course page on Javadoc.

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