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<H2><FONT FACE="Verdana">
Thinking in Java, 2nd edition, Revision 12</FONT></H2>
<H3><FONT FACE="Verdana">©2000 by Bruce Eckel</FONT></H3>
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</P></DIV><A NAME="preface"></A><A NAME="_Toc477690719"></A><A NAME="_Toc481064446"></A><A NAME="Heading1"></A><FONT FACE = "Verdana"><H1 ALIGN="LEFT">
Preface</H1></FONT>
<DIV ALIGN="LEFT"><P><FONT FACE="Georgia" SIZE=4><backtalk:display ID=TIJ3_PREFACE_I0>
I
suggested to my brother Todd, who is making the leap from hardware into
programming, that the next big revolution will be in genetic
engineering.</FONT><BR></P></DIV>
<DIV ALIGN="LEFT"><P><FONT FACE="Georgia">We’ll have microbes designed to
make food, fuel, and plastic; they’ll clean up pollution and in general
allow us to master the manipulation of the physical world for a fraction of what
it costs now. I claimed that it would make the computer revolution look small in
comparison.
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</FONT><BR></P></DIV>
<DIV ALIGN="LEFT"><P><FONT FACE="Georgia">Then I realized I was making a mistake
common to science fiction writers: getting lost in the technology (which is of
course easy to do in science fiction). An experienced writer knows that the
story is never about the things; it’s about the people. Genetics will have
a very large impact on our lives, but I’m not so sure it will dwarf the
computer revolution (which enables the genetic revolution)—or at least the
information revolution. Information is about talking to each other: yes, cars
and shoes and especially genetic cures are important, but in the end those are
just trappings. What truly matters is how we relate to the world. And so much of
that is about communication.
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</FONT><BR></P></DIV>
<DIV ALIGN="LEFT"><P><FONT FACE="Georgia">This book is a case in point. A majority
of folks thought I was very bold or a little crazy to put the entire thing up on
the Web. “Why would anyone buy it?” they asked. If I had been of a
more conservative nature I wouldn’t have done it, but I really
didn’t want to write another computer book in the same old way. I
didn’t know what would happen but it turned out to be the smartest thing
I’ve ever done with a
book.
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</FONT><BR></P></DIV>
<DIV ALIGN="LEFT"><P><FONT FACE="Georgia">For one thing, people started sending in
corrections. This has been an amazing process, because folks have looked into
every nook and cranny and caught both technical and grammatical errors, and
I’ve been able to eliminate bugs of all sorts that I know would have
otherwise slipped through. People have been simply terrific about this, very
often saying “Now, I don’t mean this in a critical way...” and
then giving me a collection of errors I’m sure I never would have found. I
feel like this has been a kind of group process and it has really made the book
into something special.
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</FONT><BR></P></DIV>
<DIV ALIGN="LEFT"><P><FONT FACE="Georgia">But then I started hearing “OK,
fine, it’s nice you’ve put up an electronic version, but I want a
printed and bound copy from a real publisher.” I tried very hard to make
it easy for everyone to print it out in a nice looking format but that
didn’t stem the demand for the published book. Most people don’t
want to read the entire book on screen, and hauling around a sheaf of papers, no
matter how nicely printed, didn’t appeal to them either. (Plus, I think
it’s not so cheap in terms of laser printer toner.) It seems that the
computer revolution won’t put publishers out of business, after all.
However, one student suggested this may become a model for future publishing:
books will be published on the Web first, and only if sufficient interest
warrants it will the book be put on paper. Currently, the great majority of all
books are financial failures, and perhaps this new approach could make the
publishing industry more
profitable.
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</FONT><BR></P></DIV>
<DIV ALIGN="LEFT"><P><FONT FACE="Georgia">This book became an enlightening
experience for me in another way. I originally approached Java as “just
another programming language,” which in many senses it is. But as time
passed and I studied it more deeply, I began to see that the fundamental
intention of this language is different from all the other languages I have
seen.
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<DIV ALIGN="LEFT"><P><FONT FACE="Georgia">Programming is about managing complexity:
the complexity of the problem you want to solve, laid upon the complexity of the
machine in which it is solved. Because of this complexity, most of our
programming projects fail. And yet, of all the programming languages of which I
am aware, none of them have gone all-out and decided that their main design goal
would be to conquer the complexity of developing and maintaining
programs</FONT><A NAME="fnB1" HREF="#fn1">[1]</A><FONT FACE="Georgia">. Of
course, many language design decisions were made with complexity in mind, but at
some point there were always some other issues that were considered essential to
be added into the mix. Inevitably, those other issues are what cause programmers
to eventually “hit the wall” with that language. For example, C++
had to be backwards-compatible with C (to allow easy migration for C
programmers), as well as efficient. Those are both very useful goals and account
for much of the success of C++, but they also expose extra complexity that
prevents some projects from being finished (certainly, you can blame programmers
and management, but if a language can help by catching your mistakes, why
shouldn’t it?). As another example, Visual Basic (VB) was tied to BASIC,
which wasn’t really designed to be an extensible language, so all the
extensions piled upon VB have produced some truly horrible and unmaintainable
syntax. Perl is backwards-compatible with Awk, Sed, Grep, and other Unix tools
it was meant to replace, and as a result is often accused of producing
“write-only code” (that is, after a few months you can’t read
it). On the other hand, C++, VB, Perl, and other languages like Smalltalk had
some of their design efforts focused on the issue of complexity and as a result
are remarkably successful in solving certain types of
problems.
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</FONT><BR></P></DIV>
<DIV ALIGN="LEFT"><P><FONT FACE="Georgia">What has impressed me most as I have come
to understand Java is what seems like an unflinching goal of reducing complexity
<I>for the programmer</I>. As if to say “we don’t care about
anything except reducing the time and difficulty of producing robust
code.” In the early days, this goal has resulted in code that
doesn’t run very fast (although there have been many promises made about
how quickly Java will someday run) but it has indeed produced amazing reductions
in development time; half or less of the time that it takes to create an
equivalent C++ program. This result alone can save incredible amounts of time
and money, but Java doesn’t stop there. It goes on to wrap all the complex
tasks that have become important, such as multithreading and network
programming, in language features or libraries that can at times make those
tasks trivial. And finally, it tackles some really big complexity problems:
cross-platform programs, dynamic code changes, and even security, each of which
can fit on your complexity spectrum anywhere from “impediment” to
“show-stopper.” So despite the performance problems we’ve
seen, the promise of Java is tremendous: it can make us significantly more
productive programmers.
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</FONT><BR></P></DIV>
<DIV ALIGN="LEFT"><P><FONT FACE="Georgia">One of the places I see the greatest
impact for this is on the Web. Network programming has always been hard, and
Java makes it easy (and the Java language designers are working on making it
even easier). Network programming is how we talk to each other more effectively
and cheaper than we ever have with telephones (email alone has revolutionized
many businesses). As we talk to each other more, amazing things begin to happen,
possibly more amazing even than the promise of genetic
engineering.
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</FONT><BR></P></DIV>
<DIV ALIGN="LEFT"><P><FONT FACE="Georgia">In all ways—creating the programs,
working in teams to create the programs, building user interfaces so the
programs can communicate with the user, running the programs on different types
of machines, and easily writing programs that communicate across the
Internet—Java increases the communication bandwidth <I>between people</I>.
I think that perhaps the results of the communication revolution will not be
seen from the effects of moving large quantities of bits around; we shall see
the true revolution because we will all be able to talk to each other more
easily: one-on-one, but also in groups and, as a planet. I've heard it suggested
that the next revolution is the formation of a kind of global mind that results
from enough people and enough interconnectedness. Java may or may not be the
tool that foments that revolution, but at least the possibility has made me feel
like I'm doing something meaningful by attempting to teach the
language.
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</FONT><A NAME="_Toc481064447"></A><BR></P></DIV>
<A NAME="Heading2"></A><FONT FACE = "Verdana"><H2 ALIGN="LEFT">
Preface to the 2nd edition</H2></FONT>
<DIV ALIGN="LEFT"><P><FONT FACE="Georgia">People have made many, many wonderful
comments about the first edition of this book, which has naturally been very
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