Book Image

Introduction to Programming

By : Nick Samoylov
Book Image

Introduction to Programming

By: Nick Samoylov

Overview of this book

Have you ever thought about making your computer do what you want it to do? Do you want to learn to program, but just don't know where to start? Instead of guiding you in the right direction, have other learning resources got you confused with over-explanations? Don't worry. Look no further. Introduction to Programming is here to help. Written by an industry expert who understands the challenges faced by those from a non-programming background, this book takes a gentle, hand-holding approach to introducing you to the world of programming. Beginning with an introduction to what programming is, you'll go on to learn about languages, their syntax, and development environments. With plenty of examples for you to code alongside reading, the book's practical approach will help you to grasp everything it has to offer. More importantly, you'll understand several aspects of application development. As a result, you'll have your very own application running by the end of the book. To help you comprehensively understand Java programming, there are exercises at the end of each chapter to keep things interesting and encourage you to add your own personal touch to the code and, ultimately, your application.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)

JVM Processes and Garbage Collection

This chapter allows readers to look under the hood of JVM and learn about its processes. The structure and behavior of JVM is more complex than just an executor of a sequence of instructions according to the coded logic. JVM finds and loads into the memory the .class files requested by the application, verifies them, interprets the bytecodes (translates them into platform-specific binary code), and passes the resulting machine code to the central processor (or processors) for execution, using several service threads in addition to the application threads. One of the service threads, called garbage collection, performs the important mission of releasing the memory from unused objects.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • What are JVM processes?
  • JVM architecture
  • Garbage collection
  • Threads
  • Exercise – Monitoring JVM while...