Audience

This book is for computer professionals, students, technical people, and Finnish hackers. It's for everyone who has a need for hands-on experience with the Java language with an eye towards building real applications. This book could also be considered a crash course in object-oriented programming; as you learn about Java, you'll also learn a powerful and practical approach to object-oriented software development.

Superficially, Java looks like C or C++, so you'll be in the best position to use this book if you've some experience with one of these languages. If you do not, you might want to reference books like O'Reilly's Practical C Programming for a more thorough treatment of basic C syntax. However, don't make too much of the syntactic similarities between Java and C or C++. In many respects, Java acts like more dynamic languages such as Smalltalk and Lisp. Knowledge of another object-oriented programming language should certainly help, although you may have to change some ideas and unlearn a few habits. Java is considerably simpler than languages like C++ and Smalltalk.

Much of the interest in Java has centered around World Wide Web applets. Although we encourage you to take a broader view, you would have every right to be disappointed if we ignored the Web. Much of the book does discuss Java as a language for World Wide Web applications, so you should be familiar with the basic ideas behind Web browsers, servers, and Web documents.