For nearly five years, one book has served as the definitive reference to Java for all serious developers: The Java Language Specification, by James Gosling, Bill Joy, and Guy Steele. Now, these world-renowned Java authorities (along with new co-author Gilad Bracha) have delivered a monumental update. This completely revised Second Edition covers Java 2 SDK Standard Edition Version 1.3 with unprecedented depth and precision, offering the invaluable insights of Java's creators to every developer. The book begins by describing the lexical structure of the Java programming language, and how it builds on C and C++. Next, it introduces Java's types, values, and variables; then describes conversions and numeric promotions in Java. The authors introduce names, declarations, members, qualified names and naming conventions; the structure of Java programs and their organization into packages containing classes, interfaces, and subpackages. Classes are covered in depth, followed by interface types, arrays, exceptions, program initialization and execution, and a detailed review of binary compatibility. There are chapters on blocks and statements, expressions, definite assignment, threads and locks, and finally, a syntactic grammar for the Java language.