Beginning Java 7

Beginning Java 7 guides you through this language and a huge assortment of platform APIs according to the following table of contents:

Chapter 1: Getting Started with Java
Chapter 2: Discovering Classes and Objects
Chapter 3: Exploring Advanced Language Features
Chapter 4: Touring Language APIs
Chapter 5: Collecting Objects
Chapter 6: Touring Additional Utility APIs
Chapter 7: Creating and Enriching Graphical User Interfaces
Chapter 8: Interacting with Filesystems
Chapter 9: Interacting with Networks and Databases
Chapter 10: Parsing, Creating, and Transforming XML Documents
Chapter 11: Working with Web Services
Chapter 12: Java 7 Meets Android
Appendix A: Solutions to Exercises
Appendix B: Scripting API and Dynamically Typed Language Support
Appendix C: Odds and Ends
Appendix D: Applications Gallery

Chapter 1 introduces you to Java and begins to cover the Java language by focusing on fundamental concepts such as comments, identifiers, variables, expressions, and statements.

Chapter 2 continues to explore this language by presenting all of its features for working with classes and objects. You learn about features related to class declaration and object creation, encapsulation, information hiding, inheritance, polymorphism, interfaces, and garbage collection.

Chapter 3 focuses on the more advanced language features related to nested classes, packages, static imports, exceptions, assertions, annotations, generics, and enums. Additional chapters will introduce you to the few features not covered in Chapters 1 through 3.

Chapter 4 largely moves away from covering language features (although it does introduce class literals and strictfp) while focusing on language-oriented APIs. You learn about Math, StrictMath, Package, Primitive Type Wrapper Classes, Reference, Reflection, String, StringBuffer and StringBuilder, Threading, BigDecimal, and BigInteger in this chapter.

Chapter 5 begins to explore Java's utility APIs by focusing largely on the Collections Framework. However, it also discusses legacy collection-oriented APIs and how to create your own collections.

Chapter 6 continues to focus on utility APIs by presenting the concurrency utilities along with the Objects and Random classes.

Chapter 7 moves you away from the command-line user interfaces that appear in previous chapters and toward graphical user interfaces. You first learn about the Abstract Window Toolkit foundation, and then explore the Java Foundation Classes in terms of Swing and Java 2D. Appendix C explores Accessibility and Drag and Drop.

Chapter 8 explores filesystem-oriented I/O in terms of the File, RandomAccessFile, stream, and writer/reader classes. New I/O is covered in Appendix C.

Chapter 9 introduces you to Java's network APIs,...