.

• Emphasizes the Software Engineering skills necessary to be a good programmer.

• Uses standard awt and swing classes.

• Takes advantage of the new features of Java 5.0 including integration of standard container classes, enumerated types, autoboxing, and generic types.

• Inheritance introduced early and covered in later chapters. 

• Software Engineering Hint boxes offer a collection of software developer "best practices" such as how to format a language construct for good programming style, or the way that good programmers approach a common design problem.

• Makes extensive use of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) for diagramming notation.  Using UML diagrams expose students to the same notations that have now become standard in the software development industry.