Cay Horstmann has thoroughly updated his legendary Core Java to reflect Java 2, Standard Edition, Version 1.4. The book's new coverage includes these and many other significant enhancements: regular expressions; the high-performance New I/O API; chained exceptions, logging, and other techniques for building more reliable code; and the Preference Class, Java's new cross-platform repository for configuration information. Horstmann presents state-of-the-art discussions of object-oriented Java development, reflection and proxies, updated coverage of Swing user interface development, definitive introductions to inner classes and the Java event model, thorough explanations of stream I/O and object serialization, and much more. This edition contains new review questions and practice exercises, along with even more of the robust, real-world programs previous editions are famous for—all fully updated to reflect the latest JDK features and improvements.