Table of Contents

Intro; 1 Breaking the Surface: a quick dip; 2 A Trip to Objectville: yes, there will be objects; 3 Know Your Variables: primitives and references; 4 How Objects Behave: object state affects method behavior; 5 Extra-Strength Methods: flow control, operations, and more; 6 Using the Java Library: so you don?t have to write it all yourself; 7 Better Living in Objectville: planning for the future; 8 Serious Polymorphism: exploiting abstract classes and interfaces; 9 Life and Death of an Object: constructors and memory management; 10 Numbers Matter: math, formatting, wrappers, and statics; 11 Risky Behavior: exception handling; 12 A Very Graphic Story: intro to GUI, event handling, and inner classes; 13 Work on Your Swing: layout managers and components; 14 Saving Objects: serialization and I/O; 15 Make a Connection: networking sockets and multithreading; 16 Data Structures: collections and generics 17 Release Your Code: packaging and deployment; 18 Distributed Computing: RMI with a dash of servlets, EJB, and Jini; A Appendix A: Final code kitchen; B Appendix B: Top Ten Things that didn?t make it into the rest of the book; Index

About the Author

Kathy Sierra has been interested in learning theory since her days as a game developer (Virgin, MGM, Amblin'). More recently, she's been a master trainer for Sun Microsystems, teaching Sun's java instructors how to teach the latest technologies to customers, and a lead developer of several Sun certification exams. Along with her partner Bert Bates, Kathy created the Head First series. She's also the original founder of the Software Development/Jolt Productivity Award-winning javaranch.com, the largest (and friendliest) all-volunteer Java community. Bert Bates is a 20-year software developer, a Java instructor, and a co-developer of Sun's upcoming EJB exam (Sun Certified Business Component Developer). His background features a long stint in artificial intelligence, with clients like the Weather Channel, A&E Network, Rockwell, and Timken.