Book Image

The Java Workshop

By : David Cuartielles, Andreas Göransson, Eric Foster-Johnson
Book Image

The Java Workshop

By: David Cuartielles, Andreas Göransson, Eric Foster-Johnson

Overview of this book

Java is a versatile, popular programming language used across a wide range of industries. Learning how to write effective Java code can take your career to the next level, and The Java Workshop will help you do just that. This book is designed to take the pain out of Java coding and teach you everything you need to know to be productive in building real-world software. The Workshop starts by showing you how to use classes, methods, and the built-in Collections API to manipulate data structures effortlessly. You’ll dive right into learning about object-oriented programming by creating classes and interfaces and making use of inheritance and polymorphism. After learning how to handle exceptions, you’ll study the modules, packages, and libraries that help you organize your code. As you progress, you’ll discover how to connect to external databases and web servers, work with regular expressions, and write unit tests to validate your code. You’ll also be introduced to functional programming and see how to implement it using lambda functions. By the end of this Workshop, you’ll be well-versed with key Java concepts and have the knowledge and confidence to tackle your own ambitious projects with Java.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Introduction

While Java has been around for over 20 years now, and Functional Programming (FP) has been around for even longer than Java, it's not been until recently that the topic of FP has caught traction in the Java community. This is probably due to Java being an inherently imperative programming language; when learning Java, you learn OOP.

However, the movements in the mainstream programming community have, in the past few years, shifted more toward FP. These days, you can see it on every platform—from the web to mobile to servers. FP concepts are everywhere.

Background

FP has been around for a very long time even though it is a relatively new topic in Java. In fact, it has been around even longer than the first personal computer; it has its origins in the lambda calculus study that Alonzo Church created in the 1930s.

The name "lambda" comes from the Greek symbol, which was the symbol Church decided to use when describing the rules and mathematical...