Introduction

This lesson discusses the prerequisites and goals of the course and introduces the new features that have been added to Java 8.

We'll cover the following

Introduction

Java is a programming language that was developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems in 1995. The latest version of java is Java 12, or JDK 12, which was released on March 19th, 2019. Although Java has released its 12th version, Java 8 is the most widely used version of Java presently.

Java 8 has introduced a lot of new APIs that have changed the way code is written in Java. Code written in Java 8 is more concise, more readable, and faster, but a developer needs a thorough understanding of the concepts to fully utilize the power of Java 8.

This course aims to help the readers develop a solid understanding of all the features of Java 8 and their practical usages.

Prerequisites

The reader must have a basic understanding of the Java language. This course does not teach Java from scratch; it only covers the new features that were introduced in Java 8.

What you will learn in this course?

After completing this course, you will be well versed in all the new features introduced in Java 8. Additionally, you will be able to use lambda expressions in your code and use the power of Stream API to make your code more readable, faster, and more concise.

We will be covering the following topics in this course.

  1. Functional interfaces
  2. Default and static methods in interfaces
  3. Lambda expressions
  4. Streams API
  5. The new Date and Time API
  6. Concurrency enhancements
  7. Collections API improvements.

In the next lesson, we will discuss the default methods in interfaces and their purposes.