On February 21, 1997 Sun Microsystems Inc., IBM Corp., Netscape Communications Corp., and Novell Inc. launched the Java World Tour (javaworldtour.sbexpos.com), a series of one-day educational events broadcast to several dozen cities in the United States, Europe, and Asia. If you missed that broadcast, this tour of Java resources on the Internet can help you launch or enrich your Java development efforts.
For the latest addition to the ever-growing family of Java APIs and SDKs, the lower-left corner of JavaSoft's home page often announces the newest download. At press time (early March), this corner featured the first beta version of the Java Web Server Beta & Servlet Development Kit (at jeeves.javasoft.com). This SDK lets developers write server-side applications in Java. To catch up with the rest of the Java family, stop by one of my JavaSoft favorite pages: the Java API Overview at www.javasoft.com/products/api-overview.html. This page summarizes the current status of each API, and it has download links for all SDKs and specification documents that are available.
If you need to get acquainted with Java, the "Where Can I Read About. . ." link on JavaSoft's home page brings you to a page with links to white papers, FAQs, documentation, and a tutorial. The Java Tutorial at www.javasoft.com/nav/read/tutorial.html is an online version of an 831-page book authored by Mary Campione and Kathy Walrath and published by Addison-Wesley as part of its Java series (www.aw.com/cp/javaseries.html). The tutorial was originally based on version 1.0.2 of the JDK, but sections have been updated based on version 1.1. For example, the tutorial now includes a new JavaBeans Tutorial by Greg Voss.
The Web has voluminous other resources for learning about Java. Of the several lists of Java books, the first one I visit is Cye H. Waldman's Definitive HTML Book List at wwwiz.com/books. This exhaustive resource covers many Internet topics, not just Java. To hone in on the Java list, click on "Subjects," then "Java." In early March, this list had 647 Java titles. This site is presented by WWWiz Magazine, which also runs the online WWWiz Bookstore. You can find another Java books list at The Java Book Pages at lightyear.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~srp/java/javabooks.html. (This site is maintained and copyrighted by Stephen R. Pietrowicz.)
Gamelan is not the only Java resource site worth visiting. Take a look at The Java Repository (java.wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de), which is set up and maintained by people associated with the Institute of Information Systems in Frankfurt, Germany. Whang's Java List at www.sicc.co.kr/~sjwhang/javalist is a broad and deep directory of links to Java programming resources of all kinds. This site is maintained by Seong-Jun Whang of SsangYong Information & Communications Corp. in Korea.
Of course, the sites mentioned here are merely a small sample of the Java universe. But most of these sites provide rich collections of links to many other Java resources for developers who wish to explore further.