By Carl Albing and Michael Schwarz
JAVA AND LINUX
Why another book on Java? Why a book on Java and Linux? Isn’t Java a platform- independent system? Aren’t there enough books on Java? Can’t I learn everything I need to know from the Web?
No doubt, there are a host of Java books on the market. We didn’t wake up one morning and say, “You know what the world really needs? Another book about Java!” No. What we realized was that there are a couple of “holes” in the Java book market.
First, Linux as a development platform and deployment platform for Java applications has been largely ignored. This is despite the fact that the *nix platform (meaning all UNIX and UNIX-like systems, Linux included) has long been recognized as one of the most programmer-friendly platforms in existence. Those few resources for Java on Linux that exist emphasize tools to the exclusion of the Java language and APIs.
Second, books on the Java language and APIs have focused on pedagogical examples that serve to illustrate the details of the language and its libraries, but very few of these examples are in themselves practically useful, and they tend to deal only with the issues of writing programs, and not at all with deploying and maintaining them. Anyone who has worked on a major software project, especially a software project that is developed and deployed in a business for a business, knows that designing and coding are only about half of the work involved. Yes, writing Java code is only slightly affected by the development and the deployment platform, but the process of releasing and maintaining such applications is significantly different between platforms.