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)

Threads

As we have mentioned already, the main application thread can create other - child - threads and let them run in parallel, either sharing the same core via time slicing or having a dedicated CPU for each thread. It can be done using the class java.lang.Thread, which implements the functional interface Runnable. The interface is called functional if it has only one abstract method (we will discuss functional interfaces in Chapter 17, Lambda Expressions and Functional Programming). The Runnable interface contains one method, run().

There are two ways to create a new thread:

  • Extend the Thread class
  • Implement the Runnable interface and pass the object of the implementation into the constructor of the class Thread

Extending the Thread class

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