Other Java Books and Resources

This book is part of a series of Java books from O'Reilly & Associates that covers everything you wanted to know, and then some. The Java AWT Reference is paired with the Java Fundamental Class Reference to document the entire Core Java API. Other books in the series provide an introduction (Exploring Java) and document the virtual machine (  Java Virtual Machine), the language (  Java Language Reference), multithreaded programming (  Java Threads), and network programming (  Java Network Programming), with more to come. Java in a Nutshell is another popular Java book in the Nutshell series from O'Reilly. For a complete up-to-date list of the available Java resources, refer to http://www.ora.com/info/java/.

In addition to the resources from O'Reilly, Sun's online documentation on Java is maintained at http://www.javasoft.com/nav/download/index.html. Information on specific Java-capable browsers can be found at their respective Web sites, which are listed in Table 0.1. More are sure to be on the way. (Some browsers are platform specific, while others are multi-platform.)

Newsgroups also serve as a discussion area for Java-related topics. The comp.lang.java group has formally split into several others. The new groups are:

For folks without time to dig through all the noise, Digital Espresso provides a periodic digest of the newsfeed at http://www.io.org./~mentor/DigitalEspresso.html. A list of Java FAQs is at http://www-net.com/java/faq/; one of the most interesting is Cafe Au Lait, at http://sunsite.unc.edu/javafaq/. (Cafe Au Lait is written by Elliotte Rusty Harold, author of Java Network Programming.)

Local Java user groups are another good resource. (Having founded one myself, I'm biased.) What they offer varies greatly, but unless you look at one, you are potentially leaving out a vast resource for knowledge and experience. Lists of area user groups are available from JavaSoft at http://www.javasoft.com/Mail/usrgrp.html; also check out the Sun User Group's Special Interest Group for Users of Java at http://www.sug.org/Java/groups.html. In addition to the usual monthly meetings and forums, some maintain a mailing list for technical exchanges.

Security is a major issue with Java. If you are interested in reading more about Java security issues, Princeton University's Safe Internet Programming Web site at http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/News.html is an excellent resource.