Learning Java Programming Language

18th February 2008

Author: 2Deano

There are many programming languages available and each of them is suitable for another program or application. There are people who have learnt only a few programming languages and who use these because that is what they know, bust most of the times software programmers will use the programming language that is required by the application they are creating. Java is one of the most frequently used programming language and writing in this language is somehow different from the usual Pascal or any C/C++ version but that does not mean that learning the java code is harder than learning Pascal or C++. Nowadays there are numerous applications written in Java and its terminology it may seem a bit harder in the beginning but anyone can write in this programming language, that's for sure.

When looking into a new programming language, most people would like to know if it is easy to learn and work in. If you compare it to C or C++, you may discover that indeed, using it can be more straight forward. This is due to the fact that Java has far fewer surprises compared to C versions. C and C++ make use of a lot of peculiarities so learning and mastering them all can be a daunting task (for example, temporary variables hang around long after the function that created them has terminated). Being more straight forward, Java is a bit easier to learn and to work with. Java eliminates explicit pointer dereferences and memory allocation/reclamation, for example, two of the most complicated sources of bugs for C and C++ programmers. Out of range subscripts are easy to find, as Java is able to do add array bounds checking. Others may argue that it seems easier to work with because there are very few examples of extremely complicated projects done using it, but the general accepted idea is that it is somehow easier to master than C or C++.

Learning Java programming is not very difficult, especially if you are familiar with other, more basic, programming languages and you know for sure what you want to create using it and it has a series of benefits compared to C and C++. First of all, code written in this programming language is portable. Code written in C and C++ is not and this makes Java more practical (for example, in C and C++, each implementation decides the precision and storage requirements for basic data types.

When you want to move from one system to another, this is a source of problems because changes in numeric precision can affect calculations). On the other hand, Java defines the size of basic types for all implementations (for example, an "int" on one system is the same size and it represents the same range of values as on every other given system). Find out more at http://www.whatiscomputerprogramming.com

The cases of programs that make use of floating point arithmetic requires a special attention: a program that uses floating point calculations can produce different answers on different systems (in this case, the degree of difference increases with the number of calculations a particular value goes through). But this is a thing specific to all floating point code, not only Java code which is also more portable then C or C++ in its object code. It compiles to an object code for a theoretical machine - in other words, the interpreter emulates that machine. This translates to the fact that code compiled on one computer will run on other computer machines that has a Java interpreter, but more on this subject you will find out while learning Java programming.


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