Welcome to the second edition of A Primer on Java, a short (e)book meant as a gentle introduction to the basics of Java. This text was previously referred to as Essential Java in its first edition. I changed the name on the suggestion of the Reddit community to keep it in line with my other book on SQL. Thanks for the excellent suggestion people.

As before, no prior programming experience is necessary to read this text. But any knowledge of how programs work will benefit the reader greatly while reading the text. Two new chapters (Strings and Packages) have been added, but this text is still far from being a complete introduction to Java.

The Further Reading section at the end of the book should give you some decent pointers on what to pick up next.

Your questions, comments, criticism, encouragement and corrections are most welcome and you can e-mail me at rhlbatra[aht]hotmail[dot]com. I will try answering all on-topic mails and will try to include suggestions, errors and omissions in future editions.