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

Atomic classes

Data integrity can easily be a problem in a concurrent program. Imagine two threads reading a value, and then both changing it and overwriting each other’s change right after. This could, for example, result in a counter that ends up being only one higher, while it should be two higher. Data integrity gets lost! This is where atomic classes come in.

Atomic classes are used for atomic operations. That means that the read (getting a value) and write (changing a value) are considered one operation instead of two separate ones. This avoids the problems with data integrity that we just demonstrated. We’ll briefly discuss how to use AtomicInteger, AtomicLong, and AtomicReference.

AtomicInteger, AtomicLong, and AtomicReference

There are several atomic classes for basic data types. We have AtomicInteger to represent an integer value and support atomic operations on it. Similarly, we have AtomicLong for the Long type. We have AtomicReference for references...