Appendix C. Not familiar with Java?
This appendix is a collection of brief introductory texts that back up the material in the language tutorial chapters and elsewhere. Many of this book’s readers will have arrived at JavaFX from Java, but not all of you. JavaFX is deliberately designed to have a broad appeal beyond just the regular Java desktop programmers. The problem was this: how to supply the necessary background knowledge about the Java platform to the latter, without boring the former. This appendix is the solution.
Each section in this appendix deals in detail with those nuanced workings of the Java platform that apply to JavaFX, as well as other associated background material.
Although JavaFX Script started life as a scripting language, it does not adopt the loose laissez-faire attitude toward variable types found in other scripting languages. If you came here from a design background (perhaps with some basic scripting experience thanks to early versions of JavaScript or ActionScript), you may not be familiar with how a statically typed language differs from a dynamically typed one.