Looking more like a completely new product than just a revision of an older language, Tiger is chock-full of dramatic changes to what you know as simply Java. You can't just read through the release notes and figure this one out; and since the new features are a lot more important than all the oddities about its versioning, I'll just call it Tiger throughout the book, and sidestep Java 2 version 5...er...version 1.5...well...as I said, Tiger.

Whatever Tiger ends up being called officially, it introduces so many new features to the language that it took nearly 200 pages to cover them— and you'll find that each page of this book is dense with code, example, and terse explanation. There isn't any wasted space. In fact, that's precisely what you're holding in your hands—a concise crash course in the next evolution of Java, Tiger. By the time you're through, you'll be typing your lists, taking your overloading to an entirely new level, writing compile-time checked annotations, and threading more efficiently than ever. And that doesn't take into account how much fun it is to type all sorts of new characters into your source code. You haven't lived until @, <, >, and % are strewn throughout your editor...well, maybe that's just me wanting to have a little more fun at the workplace. Whatever your reason for getting into Tiger, though, you'll find more tools at your disposal than ever before, and far more change in any version of Java since its initial 1.0 release. Fire up your code editor, buckle your seat belts, and get ready to hit the ground running.

Let's tame the Tiger.