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The Essential Java Class Reference for Programmers

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As Java has gotten built out, the default SDK has a huge number of packages. Can be overwhelming. Typically you don't need to know all or even most of these. But which should you know? Durney supplies one such choice of packages in his book. It does not cover those packages or classes involving elementary syntax. You should already have these down.

Instead, he offers certain packages of high utility. Take the NumberFormat class as an example. It lets you control the number of digits in an output. Then there are the far more complex Date and Calendar classes. These deal with various different conventions for showing the date, as well as a host of language dependent issues. For example, in most of the world, a date is written in the format day-month-year. But the US uses month-day-year. So you might need to customise your displays accordingly. These classes are also deal with the non-metric nature of the many time divisions. As a programmer, you can use the classes instead of having to re-invent a lot of functionality.

But the book's chapter on Applet usage may be less useful to many readers. As Java has developed, Applets have gotten steadily downplayed. Little serious programming appears to be done with these. Before some of you get irate and berate me, take a look at the latest Sun documentation. Sun has pushed Java steadily into server-side applications, where it is doing quite well.