Cay S. Horstmann - Core Java, Volume II: Advanced Features

The chapters in this book are, for the most part, independent of each other. You should be able to delve into whatever topic interests you the most and read the chapters in any order.

In , you will learn all about the Java 8 stream library that brings a modern flavor to processing data, by specifying what you want without describing in detail how the result should be obtained. This allows the stream library to focus on an optimal evaluation strategy, which is particularly advantageous for optimizing concurrent computations.

The topic of hood when you use the object serialization mechanism, which makes saving and loading objects easy and convenient. We then move on to regular expressions and working with files and paths.

covers XML. We show you how to parse XML files, how to generate XML, and how to use XSL transformations. As a useful example, we show you how to specify the layout of a Swing form in XML. We also discuss the XPath API, which makes finding needles in XML haystacks much easier.

covers the networking API. Java makes it phenomenally easy to do complex network programming. We show you how to make network connections to servers, how to implement your own servers, and how to make HTTP connections.

covers database programming. The main focus is on JDBC, the Java database connectivity API that lets Java programs connect to relational databases. We show you how to write useful programs to handle realistic database chores, using a core subset of the JDBC API. (A complete treatment of the JDBC API would require a book almost as big as this one.) We finish the chapter with a brief introduction into hierarchical databases and discuss JNDI (the Java Naming and Directory Interface) and LDAP (the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol).

Java had two prior attempts at libraries for handling date and time. The third one is the charm in Java 8. In , you will learn how to deal with the complexities of calendars and time zones, using the new date and time library.

discusses a feature that we believe can only grow in importance: internationalization. The Java programming language is one of the few languages designed from the start to handle Unicode, but the internationalization support in the Java platform goes much further. As a result, you can internationalize Java applications so that they cross not only platforms but country boundaries as well. For example, we show you how to write a retirement calculator that uses either English, German, or Chinese languages.

discusses three techniques for processing code. The scripting and compiler APIs allow your program to call code in scripting languages such as JavaScript or Groovy, and to compile Java code. Annotations allow you to add arbitrary information (sometimes called metadata) to a Java program. We show you how annotation processors can harvest these annotations at the source or class file level, and how annotations can be used to influence the behavior of classes at runtime. Annotations are only useful with tools, and we hope that our discussion will help you select useful annotation processing tools for your needs.

and security managers for special-purpose applications. Then, we take up the security API that allows for such important features as message and code signing, authorization and authentication, and encryption. We conclude with examples that use the AES and RSA encryption algorithms.