Java for Not Yet Techies

"Computer Careers: How to Get Started with High Tech Jobs Using the Hot Hotter Hottest Programming Language of All"

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

Java is the programming language of your computer career future, if it exists today. Many people might dispute that or simply not like it, but there’s little doubt it’s true for Java. Why? In a word, the . . .

Internet

The Net and all related computer technologies are pulling the industry in that direction with a force as inescapable as the sun’s gravitation. The future of computers is on the Internet or its small brothers and sisters, company intranet and extranets, and Java fits into that picture.

Java wasn’t made specifically for the Internet, but it might as well have been

Java was designed by Sun Microsystems in the early 90s to be embedded in household articles. This area of application is developing more slowly than the Internet and is not yet as sexy, but it’s coming. Someday you will shout instructions to your toaster and your coffee maker as you go to take your morning shower, and your toast and coffee will be just as you ordered (unless there’s a bug in the program!)

This means that Java was designed to be a "cross-platform" language

If you write a program in C, you must take into account whether that program will be run on a PC or a Mac or a Unix work station. The C PC program will not run on a Mac or vice versa. Since Java was designed to be run on toasters, it will work on any computer that can recognize it.

When the Internet became the hottest in thing in 1995, somebody at Sun said, "Hey, we’ve got this language that can run on anybody’s toaster. If it can do that, it can run on anybody’s PC, Mac or Unix. And this Internet thing is all kinds of PCs, Macs and Unixs networked together. Sounds perfect for the Internet."

And so Java is

It is also an object oriented program (OOP). This "object-oriented" concept is probably more difficult for experienced programmers to understand, because they are in the habit of thinking of programs as a line by line flow of action. In OOP programs, however, parts of the code can be in sections which are treated as complete "objects."

This allows for a degree of modularity. That is, if you are writing a program and you come to a section where it needs to perform some task, and that particular task or object has already been written for another program, you can simply stick that "object" into your program and let this object perform the same task for your program too.

This makes programs faster and easier to write and maintain than before on your computer job

An object can be a data value or a variable or a very highly complex set of code, but it can be treated sort of as a "package" or – you guessed it – an "object." It can be squeezed, fondled, tossed from hand to hand, kicked etc. Whatever you as the programmer need. You can even change how operators work, so it does have a lot of advantages for programmers over the traditional languages. The key concept is that objects can be reused. This "recycling" can save you a lot of time and trouble.

It is said to be simple to learn. That’s most true if you are already a C or C++ programmer, since it was modeled on C and C++. It is a small language, which makes Java more efficient for the Internet.

Next: Java -- 2

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