Version 5.0 of the Java 2 Standard Edition SDK is the most important upgrade since Java first appeared a decade ago. With Java 5.0, you'll not only find substantial changes in the platform, but to the language itself-something that developers of Java took five years to complete. The main goal of Java 5.0 is to make it easier for you to develop safe, powerful code, but none of these improvements makes Java any easier to learn, even if you've programmed with Java for years. And that means our bestselling hands-on tutorial takes on even greater significance.

Learning Java is the most widely sought introduction to the programming language that's changed the way we think about computing. Our updated third edition takes an objective, no-nonsense approach to the new features in Java 5.0, some of which are drastically different from the way things were done in any previous versions. The most essential change is the addition of "generics", a feature that allows developers to write, test, and deploy code once, and then reuse the code again and again for different data types. The beauty of generics is that more problems will be caught during development, and Learning Java will show you exactly how it's done.

Java 5.0 also adds more than 1,000 new classes to the Java library. That means 1,000 new things you can do without having to program it in yourself. That's a huge change. With our book's practical examples, you'll come up to speed quickly on this and other new features such as loops and threads. The new edition also includes an introduction to Eclipse, the open source IDE that is growing in popularity.