Prerequisites

This book assumes that you have some programming familiarity; you understand that a
program is a collection of statements, the idea of a subroutine/function/macro, control
statements such as “if” and looping constructs such as “while,” etc. However, you might
have learned this in many places, such as programming with a macro language or working
with a tool like Perl. As long as you’ve programmed to the point where you feel comfortable
with the basic ideas of programming, you’ll be able to work through this book. Of course,
the book will be easier for the C programmers and more so for the C++ programmers, but
28 Thinking in Java www.BruceEckel.com
don’t count yourself out if you’re not experienced with those languages (but come willing to
work hard). I’ll be introducing the concepts of object-oriented programming and Java’s basic
control mechanisms, so you’ll be exposed to those, and the first exercises will involve the
basic control-flow statements.
Although references will often be made to C and C++ language features, these are not
intended to be insider comments, but instead to help all programmers put Java in perspective
with those languages, from which, after all, Java is descended. I will attempt to make these
references simple and to explain anything that I think a non- C/C++ programmer would
not be familiar with.