Core Java programming

Java as an object-oriented programming language has evolved to be the most predominant and popular general purpose programming language of the present software industry. Companies of all sizes are using Java as the main programming language to develop various applications/projects world wide. It has found its use in various sectors including banking, insurance, retail, media, education, manufacturing and so on. E-Commerce, Gaming, Mobile, Embedded, Media and many more types of applications are being developed using Java. Organizations are developing mission critical applications using Java technologies. This necessitates the corporations to hire highly skilled Java developers. On the other hand it opens the doors for many opportunities for Java developers. There is significant demand for Java developers with sound technical skills. Now-a-days colleges and universities all over the world are using “Core Java programming” in their introductory courses as well as their junior and senior software engineering courses. This motivates me in writing this manuscript so that we could be able to address the needs of the present IT industry.

This tutorial starts with the most basic fundamentals (Java syntax, data types, and objects/classes) and gradually moves forward onto more advanced topics, like operators, loops, and conditional statements. This isn’t a fast paced guide to Java that rushes through the fundamentals – it gives thorough coverage of the language before moving onto more advanced topics, like the Java Application Programming Interface (API) and the new features of Java programming language.

It has a good emphasis on UML concept, object-oriented analysis and design; several diagrams are used extensively throughout this tutorial to make it easy to understand how examples work. Working through the topics will teach you how to program – not just how to write programs mechanically. Examples in the tutorial teach a wide range of topics, from simple concepts like conditional branching and looping, to high-level concepts like Exception handling, Multithreaded programming, Package, I/O operations, JDBC, Collections and Networking. The approach taken by me introduces topics gradually, and makes it easy to pick up the skills needed to program in Java. In short, this way of “learning by example” explains everything you really need to know in order to write useful Java programs.  

Java is a programming language as well as a platform. Any software or hardware environment in which a program runs, is known as the platform. As Java has a runtime environment known as JRE and API, it is called a platform. Since Java encompasses a vast domain, one may refer to this as  “Java Technology“.

Prerequisite

To learn Java technology, one must have the basic understanding of C / C++ programming language.