The Java Class Library is also simply known as the Java API. It's a huge collection of prebuilt classes that is distributed with the Java SE platform. Some of the more important themes of the library include:
- Definitions and implementations of common data structures
- Console I/O
- File I/O
- Mathematics
- Networking
- Regular expressions
- XML creation and processing
- Database access
- GUI toolkits
- Reflection
We cannot cover the complete Java Class Library here, but we want to give some examples of the APIs that are available and give you pointers on where to find the classes you need. Before we look at specific classes, we will take a look at the main organization. We'll cover the following topics:
- Java Class Library organization
- Package overview
- Fundamental classes from the java.lang package
- Collections API, namely java.util.ArrayList and java.util.HashMap ...
