Practical Java Programming

Practical Java Programming was compiled by the teaching and research team of Beijing Shangxuetang Technology Co., Ltd. and published by Tsinghua University Press in June 2018. The book has 18 chapters, about 660,000 characters, 450 pages, and 339 cases, and its content grew out of the author team's more than ten years of Java training and teaching experience. The book positions itself as teaching both practical skills and fundamentals: on one hand, it covers the main body of Java SE knowledge with a large number of runnable cases; on the other, it explains low-level content such as memory analysis, JVM operating mechanisms, data structures, and JDK source code interpretation thoroughly. The authors say their aim is to help beginners develop both practical ability and a solid foundation. The chapter outline is roughly as follows: Chapter 1 begins with the history of computer languages and Java, completes JDK installation and Eclipse use, and uses a small billiards game as the first project so readers can get hands-on early; Chapters 2–3 cover data types, operators, variables, and control statements; Chapters 4–5 cover object-oriented basics and advancement, involving classes, objects, packages, encapsulation, inheritance, interfaces, abstract classes, and inner classes, accompanied by object memory layout analysis; Chapter 6 covers exception handling; Chapter 7 covers arrays and introduces basic algorithms through sorting and searching; Chapters 8–9 cover common classes such as wrapper classes, strings, dates, Math, and File, and containers such as List, Set, and Map, while introducing data structures and source-code reading; Chapter 10 covers IO streams and introduces the Apache Commons IO library; Chapter 11 covers multithreading, synchronization mechanisms, and the producer-consumer pattern; Chapter 12 covers TCP/UDP network programming; Chapter 13 ties together the knowledge of the first 12 chapters with an airplane game project; Chapters 14–16 briefly introduce Swing interfaces, the event model, and common controls; Chapter 17 covers reflection; Chapter 18 covers core design patterns such as singleton, factory, decorator, chain of responsibility, template method, observer, and dynamic proxy. At the end of the book is a description of the accompanying "Java 300-Episode Large-Scale Teaching Video"; courseware and source code can be downloaded from the Tsinghua University Press website. Note that the book focuses on Java SE fundamentals, was completed in 2018, and its example toolchain leans toward the Eclipse and Java 8 era; web development, Spring, and other frameworks are not included, so those aiming at backend framework development will need separate specialized reading.