46 Part I: Getting Started The Java programming (Jsp hosting)
Monday, October 22nd, 200746 Part I: Getting Started The Java programming language has all the aspects of a spoken language like English. Java has words, grammar, commonly used names, stylistic idioms, and other such things. The grammar and the common names The people at Sun Microsystems who created Java thought of Java as coming in two parts. Just as English has its grammar and commonly used names, the Java programming language has its specification (its grammar) and its Application Programming Interface (its commonly used names). Whenever I write Java programs, I keep two important pieces of documentation one for each part of the language on my desk: The Java Language Specification: This includes rules like, Always put an open parenthesis after the word for and Use an asterisk to multiply two numbers. The Application Programming Interface: Java s Application Programming Interface (API) contains thousands of tools that were added to Java after the language s grammar was defined. These tools range from the commonplace to the exotic. For instance, the tools include a routine named pow that can raise 5 to the 10th power for you. A more razzle-dazzle tool (named JFrame) displays a window on your computer s screen. Other tools listen for the user s button clicks, query databases, and do all kinds of useful things. You can download the Language Specification, the API documents, and all the other Java documentation (or view the documents online) by poking around at java.sun.com/javase/downloads. But watch out! This Web page is a moving target. By the time you read this book, the links in this paragraph will probably be out of date. The safest thing to do is to start at java.sun.com, and then look for links to things like Java SE and documentation. The first part of Java, the Language Specification, is relatively small. That doesn t mean you won t take plenty of time finding out how to use the rules in the Language Specification. Other programming languages, however, have double, triple, or ten times the number of rules. The second part of Java the API can be intimidating because it s so large. The API contains at least 3,000 tools and keeps growing with each new Java language release. Pretty scary, eh? Well, the good news is that you don t have to memorize anything in the API. Nothing. None of it. You can look up the stuff you need to use in the documentation and ignore the stuff you don t need. What you use often, you ll remember. What you don t use often, you ll forget (like any other programmer). For information on how to find things in Java s API documentation, see the section entitled Finding javadoc pages, later in this chapter.
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