For nearly five years, one book has served as the definitive reference to Java for all serious developers: The Java Language Specification, by James Gosling, Bill Joy, and Guy Steele. Now, these world-renowned Java authorities (along with new co-author Gilad Bracha) have delivered a monumental update. This completely revised Second Edition covers Java 2 SDK Standard Edition Version 1.3 with unprecedented depth and precision, offering the invaluable insights of Java's creators to every developer. The book begins by describing the lexical structure of the Java programming language, and how it builds on C and C++. Next, it introduces Java's types, values, and variables; then describes conversions and numeric promotions in Java. The authors introduce names, declarations, members, qualified names and naming conventions; the structure of Java programs and their organization into packages containing classes, interfaces, and subpackages. Classes are covered in depth, followed by interface types, arrays, exceptions, program initialization and execution, and a detailed review of binary compatibility. There are chapters on blocks and statements, expressions, definite assignment, threads and locks, and finally, a syntactic grammar for the Java language.
1 Introduction
2 Grammars
3 Lexical Structure
4 Types, Values, and Variables
5 Conversions and Promotions
6 Names
7 Packages
8 Classes
9 Interfaces
10 Arrays
etc.
James Gosling is a Fellow and Vice President at Sun Microsystems, the creator of the Java programming language, and one of the computer industry's most noted programmers. He is the 1996 recipient of Software Development's "Programming Excellence Award." He previously developed NeWS, Sun's network-extensible window system, and was a principal in the Andrew project at Carnegie-Mellon University, from which he holds a PhD in Computer Science.
Gilad Bracha is Computational Theologist at Sun Microsystems, and a researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. Prior to joining Sun, he worked on StrongtalkT, the Animorphic Smalltalk System. He holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah.
Bill Joy is founder and Vice President of Research at Sun Microsystems, where he has led the company's technical strategy, working on both hardware and software architecture. He is well known as the creator of the Berkeley version of the UNIX operating system, for which he received a lifetime achievement award from the USENIX Association in 1993. He received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1986. Joy has had a central role in shaping the Java language.
Guy L. Steele Jr. is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he is responsible for the specification of the Java programming language as well as research in parallel algorithms. He is well known as the co-creator of the Scheme programming language and for his reference books for the C programming language (with Samuel Harbison) and for the Common Lisp programming language. Steele received theACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1988 and was named an ACM Fellow in 1994.