You are viewing an on-line draft of the forthcoming book, On To Java, Third Edition, by Patrick Henry Winston and Sundar Narasimhan. The principal differences between the second edition and the third edition are as follows.
You learn that, through interfaces, Java provides a powerful mechanism for specifying requirements and encouraging documentation, thus promoting good programming practice. The discussion of interfaces begins in Chapter 20 and continues throughout the rest of the book.
In this edition, you learn how to write small observer programs that transport information from domain-specific program elements to graphical-display elements and how to write small listener programs that transport information in the other direction. Thus, the domain-specific elements are kept entirely apart from the graphical-display elements. You learn that such modularity enables separate debugging and easy reuse. The improved model-view discussion begins in Chapter 41 and continues through Chapter 52.
There are two kinds of programmers: those who read the whole book, and Those that read only enough may never learn points of good programming practices if those points come late in instruction. Accordingly, you learn about the benefits of procedure abstraction, in Chapter 7, and data abstraction, in Chapter 13, and about the benefits of requirement and documentation rich interfaces, in Chapter 20, before you learn, for example, how to construct a iteration loop.
In this edition, in addition to all that was taught in the second edition, you can learn about, for example, the following.
Copyright 2001 Patrick Henry Winston and Sundar Narasimhan