Book Image

Transitioning to Java

By : Ken Fogel
Book Image

Transitioning to Java

By: Ken Fogel

Overview of this book

This comprehensive guide will help non-Java developers already using different languages transition from their current language to all things Java. The chapters are designed in a way that re-enforces a developer’s existing knowledge of object-oriented methodologies as they apply to Java. This book has been divided into four sections, with each section touching upon different aspects that’ll enable your effective transition. The first section helps you get to grips with the Java development environment and the Maven build tool for modern Java applications. In the second section, you’ll learn about Java language fundamentals, along with exploring object-oriented programming (OOP) methodologies and functional programming and discovering how to implement software design patterns in Java. The third section shows you how to code in Java on different platforms and helps you get familiar with the challenges faced on these platforms. In the fourth section, you’ll find out how you can manage and package your Java code. By the end of this Java programming book, you’ll have learned the core concepts of Java that’ll help you successfully transition from a different language to Java.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Part 1:The Java Development Environment
5
Part 2:Language Fundamentals
15
Part 3:GUI and Web Coding in Java
19
Part 4:Packaging Java Code

Integrated development environments

It is time for a little honesty – very few Java developers work with just a text editor such as vi or Notepad. Knowing how to work with a standalone text editor and compile/execute at the command line is an important skill, but when given the choice of tooling, we will always go for an IDE. The features we will look at in this section will explain why this is so.

In this section, we will briefly review four of the most widely used IDEs available. Each IDE has a unique build system, which we will discuss in Chapter 3, The Maven Build Tool, and all the IDEs support the same external build systems. This means that in a team, each member can use the IDE that they feel makes them the most productive while being able to freely move code between team members without the need to make changes for a particular IDE. Before I introduce these IDEs, let us look at the features they all share.

Feature 1 – the code editor

The heart of every...