posted 18 years ago
It's not true, and unfortunately, fallacy is rife in a lot of technical books.
However, my guess at what it was trying to say is that the first statement in a constructor must be a call to a superclass constructor or 'this' constructor, otherwise, a compile-time error results.
Here is an example that directly contradicts the statement made by your book:
http://qa.jtiger.org/GetQAndA.action?qids=10&showAnswers=true
Tony Morris
Java Q&A (FAQ, Trivia)