Jim Waldo is a Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where he investigates next-generation large-scale distributed systems. He is currently the technical lead of Project Darkstar, a multithreaded, distributed infrastructure for massive multiplayer online games and virtual worlds. Prior to his current assignment with Sun Labs, he was the lead architect for Jini, a distributed programming system based on Java.

Before joining Sun, Jim spent eight years at Apollo Computer and Hewlett Packard working in the areas of distributed object systems, user interfaces, class libraries, text, and internationalization. While at HP, he led the design and development of the first Object Request Broker, and he was instrumental in getting that technology incorporated into the first OMG CORBA specification.

Jim is a Professor of the Practice at Harvard University, where he teaches distributed computing and topics in the intersection of policy and technology in the department of computer science.

Jim received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). He also holds M.A. degrees in both linguistics and philosophy from the University of Utah. He is a member of the IEEE and ACM.

這是一本幾乎隻講java優點的書。

Jim Waldo先生是原sun微係統公司實驗室的傑齣工程師，他親曆並參與瞭java從技術萌生、發展到崛起的整個過程。在這《java語言精粹》裏，jim總結瞭他所認為的java語言及其環境的諸多精良部分，包括：類型係統、異常處理、包機製、垃圾迴收、java虛擬機、javadoc、集閤、遠程方法調用和並發機製。另外，他還從開發者的角度分析瞭在java技術周圍發展起來的“開發者生態環境”。如果要把java技術精煉到隻含有它的最佳部分，在jim看來，以上這些就是必須保留的部分。

作者還從曆史的視角闡述瞭java中某些技術的發展曆程，解釋瞭某些問題之所以存在的原因，使人讀後有一種“知其所以然”的通透感。閱讀《java語言精粹》不但能使你重溫java的核心機製，還可以使你瞭解語言的設計者和實現者們是如何權衡、摺中並維護各種不同的語言特性，從而成就瞭這門流行的係統級通用編程語言的。

相信不管是java語言的學習者，還是使用java語言構建軟件係統的開發者，以及對程序設計語言感興趣的技術愛好者，都可以從《java語言精粹》中汲取營養。