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X Preface
Other Texts
There are many good Java programming texts which are suitable for use
with this book and we mention some of them in individual chapters. We have
found the texts by Horstmann et al.[15,16,21] and by Hunt[14,32] to be very
useful.
Readers cannot do better than to have a personal copy of the seminal
work “Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” by
Gamma et al.[28] and there are many up-to-date references on design patterns
on the Web and in the literature. See, for example, the patterns home page at
http://hillside.net/patterns/, aswellasthePatternLanguagesofProgramming
(PLoP) workshops. We also provide other references to patterns
texts in the body of this book.
Trademarks
Trademarks abound. In computing there are many of them and they disrupt
the flow of written text. Readers will have noticed that we have gradually
lost the trademark signifier for Java as this Preface has progressed. We will
not generally denote trademarks as trademarks in the body of this book.
Instead, we list them all here: Java TM , Sun TM ,Microsoft TM , Windows TM ,
Apple TM , Machintosh TM ,Cray TM ,Vax TM ,DEC TM ,VMS TM ,LabView TM ,
IDL TM , Globus TM ,C# TM .
English Spelling Conventions
After some soul-searching, we have reluctantly decided to use the American-
English spelling convention in this book. Both of the authors are of the opinion
that the English language would do well to have a universal spelling convention.
Computer languages are mostly written by Americans and they are
playing a role in entrenching the American view of English spelling around
the globe. This book contains an amount of Java code whose keywords and
class names follow American English. So it seems logical to adopt this spelling
convention for this book. Unfortunately, residual UK English (actually Australian
English!) conventions creep into our code examples in method names
such as “initialise”.
Acknowledgements
Many people have helped us over many years with this project. We particularly
wish to thank: Tom Fredian and Josh Stillerman, for being the heart and
soul of MDSplus, Cesare Taliercio, the coauthor of jScope, Giulio Fregonese,
for an introduction to design patterns, Rhys Hawkins, Rod Harris, Daniel
Kivett, for help developing teaching material, including EScope, Boyd Blackwell,
for the inspiration to build this case study and for help with MDSplus and