Java is an extremely popular programming language at the moment. Although a great deal of that popularity arises from Java's position as the programming language of the world wide web, there are a number of other very good reasons why Java is so popular including the fact that it is designed to be platform-independent . That is, a Java program will execute on a variety of different computers/operating systems without having to change the code!. So, for example, a program that is writen for Win95 running on a 233 MHz Pentium PC should work just as well on a Macintosh or a Sun workstation.

While there are a number of similarities between Java and C, Java is what is termed an object-oriented language like C++. (C++ and C are not the same programming language!). Although, as noted on the previous page, I will use Java applets and provide links to Java applets on the Computing II web pages, we will not cover Java programming on this course. All the code you write will be in C .

For those of you who are interested in learning Java there are a considerable number of web sites devoted to Java. A search using any of the popular search engines (Netscape, Lycos, Excite etc...) will provide a list of sites.

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