Doug Dunn is serious about making the world a better place, and he knows one of the best ways to do it is to educate people in high-tech skills that afford them new employment opportunities. Doug left a successful career on mainframes to dedicate himself to a radically new book concept, rewriting “The Java Language Specification” so that it can be read and understood by the average programmer. Any of you who has read the Java spec knows this may be a daunting task.

Doug’s belief, however, is that that everyone is smart enough to understand this stuff, not just the best and brightest. He has devoted substantial effort to creating a new, free public wiki at JavaSpec.org [1] where his entire body of work on Java fundamentals is now available to all. This is a considerable body of work, indeed, with over a thousand pages of material already loaded into the wiki and a thousand more to come. What you’re really able to enjoy for free at JavaSpec.org is the full text of two separate, popular books on Java: “Java Rules” (Addison-Wesley, 2001) and “Java Rules, Volume 2: Mastering the Fundamentals of the Java Programming Language” (www.javarules.com, 2003).

[2]You can read Doug’s extensive account of how JavaSpec.org came to be [3] and how he hopes it will lead to the formation of an association of independent computer book authors and serve as a model for them. He knows it's a long shot, but hopes at least to introduce the idea that it is finally time for computer book authors to completely abandon the old publishing models.

Take a good look at JavaSpec.org. [4] It’s a major piece of work, a labor of love, and it may be just the reference you’ll want to turn to sometime later when there’s something about the language you’d like to understand more clearly. Doug’s commitment to helping you is clear and strong. Here it is in his own words:

"And if you really cannot understand something I am saying, write to me at doug@javaspec.org, tell me what you don’t understand, and I’ll figure out a way of saying it that you can understand. That’s a promise."