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

A Java class is a template that is used to define data types. Classes are composed of objects carrying data and methods that are used to perform operations on that data. Classes can be self-contained, extend other classes with new functionalities, or implement features from other classes. In a way, classes are categories that allow us to define what kind of data can be stored within them, as well as the ways in which that data can be handled.

Classes tell the compiler how to build a certain object during runtime. Refer to the explanation of what objects are in the Working with Objects in Java topic.

The basic structure of a class definition looks like this:

class <name> {
    fields;
    methods;
}

Note

Class names should start with a capital letter, as in TheClass, Animal, WordCount, or any other string that somehow expresses the main purpose of the class. If contained in a separate file, the filename containing...