Java 5 & 6 Reference Card

Questions and Answers

This page captures some of the feedback and questions concerning my Java Reference Card. I hope it proves helpful...

Q: Wouldn't the sheet be improved by adding more concrete examples, e.g. of a for loop: for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) System.out.println(i); even if this means sacrificing some content or moving to multiple sheets? Additional material could be provided online if necessary, but examples on the sheet itself would be helpful.
A: I'll think about this and see if I can squeeze more examples in. Part of my original motivation was to produce a free-standing summary that could be studied by students while they are travelling (hence the goal of a single piece of paper). If time permits, I will try to add additional supplementary detail.

Q: Your sheet says a boolean is 1 bit, but there is no specification of how big a boolean is.
A: The size of a boolean is indeed not specified, however a boolean holds 1 bit of information. There is some ambiguity over the "bits" column, since it isn't clear whether this indicates the size or the informational capacity. Until I can find a better way to express this distinction I'm minded to leave the column heading as "bits". There is a hint that this column does not indicate the storage requirement, since I use the infinity symbol to indicate that BigInteger and BigDecimal are unbounded (for all practical intents and purposes) in their ability to represent large values.

Any constructive feedback should be sent to: JavaRefCard @ dcs.gla.ac.uk
which has a fairly strong spam filter.