About preface

Purpose of these notes

These notes were started to fill in areas that textbooks didn't adequately teach. Where features were adequately covered in the textbook (eg, loops), you won't find much here. Where features are missing entirely from the textbook (eg, GUI!), there are more notes.

Choices made in these notes

These notes

• Use recent Java language features (currently including some version 1.5 features).
• Emphasize Graphical User Interfaces, using Swing instead of AWT. Simple console input/output is also used in some places.
• Use applications primarily, not applets. However, many examples subclass JPanel, which makes using them in applets trivial.
• Development Systems These notes do not assume a particular development system. I use Sun's NetBeans or JDK/SDK (Java/Software Development Kit) because they are commonly used by students, but there are other good choices (see Tools).