Book Image

Learn Java with Projects

By : Dr. Seán Kennedy, Maaike van Putten
5 (3)
Book Image

Learn Java with Projects

5 (3)
By: Dr. Seán Kennedy, Maaike van Putten

Overview of this book

Learn Java with Projects stands out in the world of Java guides; while some books skim the surface and others get lost in too much detail, this one finds a nice middle ground. You’ll begin by exploring the fundamentals of Java, from its primitive data types through to loops and arrays. Next, you’ll move on to object-oriented programming (OOP), where you’ll get to grips with key topics such as classes, objects, encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, interfaces, and more. The chapters are designed in a way that focuses on topics that really matter in real-life work situations. No extra fluff here, so that you get more time to spend on the basics and form a solid foundation. As you make progress, you’ll learn advanced topics including generics, collections, lambda expressions, streams and concurrency. This book doesn't just talk about theory—it shows you how things work with little projects, which eventually add up to one big project that brings it all together. By the end of this Java book, you’ll have sound practical knowledge of Java and a helpful guide to walk you through the important parts of Java.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: Java Fundamentals
9
Part 2: Object-Oriented Programming
15
Part 3: Advanced Topics

Sorting collections

So far, we’ve learned how to create collections and how to perform basic operations on them. They have a lot of useful built-in methods, and one of them helps us sort collections. The reason we are paying attention to this one is because it’s not as straightforward as some of the others.

Some types have a natural order, such as numbers. They can be easily sorted from small to large. The same goes for strings – we can sort them A-Z. But how do we sort a collection that contains custom objects of the Task type?

Stick with me – soon, you’ll be able to do both natural ordering and custom ordering while using the sort method that’s built into collections.

Natural ordering

When we talk about natural ordering, we mean the default sorting order for a particular data type. For example, numbers are sorted in ascending order, while strings are sorted lexicographically. But still, Java wouldn’t know this without us...