From Java 5 to Java 7

I just finished reading Head First Java and this is my first book on the subject, so I was wondering, ok, I got Java 5 down, but we're at Java 7 now, right? So what major stuff am I missing? I'm talking about stuff like the introduction of the for each loop back when there was no such thing, not performance issues or technical behind the scene stuff and such. For example, are we still getting interactive console input with that god ugly BefferedReader?

Christos Tsagkournis wrote:For example, are we still getting interactive console input with that god ugly BefferedReader?

The Scanner class can also be used to get user input. I am not sure of it's inner implementation details.

Welcome to the Ranch.

Besides better performance and many other behind-the-scenes improvements, Java 7 has a number of new language features and some major additions to the standard library. Here is an overview.

Things that are most visible in the language were developed in "Project Coin" (try searching for that). The "NIO.2" API is a big addition to the standard library. It contains new and more powerful APIs to work with the file system.

A good book about Java 7 is The Well-Grounded Java Developer: Java 7 and Polyglot Programming on the JVM. (One of the authors, Martijn Verburg, is also a moderator on the forums here).