About this Book
Welcome to The Well-Grounded Java Developer. This book is aimed at turning you into a Java developer for the modern age, reigniting your passion for both the language and platform. Along the way, you’ll discover new Java 7 features, ensure that you’re familiar with essential modern software techniques (such as dependency injection, test-driven development, and continuous integration), and start to explore the brave new world of non-Java languages on the JVM.
To begin, let’s consider this description of the Java language provided by James Iry in a wonderful blog post “A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages”:
1996 – James Gosling invents Java. Java is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class-based, statically typed, single dispatch, object-oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. Sun loudly heralds Java’s novelty.
While the point of Java’s entry is mostly to set up a gag where C# is given the same write-up, this is not bad as descriptions of languages go. The full blog post contains a bunch of other gems—you can find it on the web at James’ blog (http://james-iry.blogspot.com/). It’s well worth a read in an idle moment.
This does present a very real question. Why are we still talking about a language that is now around 16 years old? Surely it’s stable and not much new or interesting can be said about it?