"Java has inspired a lot of hatred, but it’s been incredibly influential in building modern enterprise software, along with the tools we use to develop, maintain, and deploy that software."
—Mike Loukides, O'Reilly Media

The road from Java's first public alpha of 1.0 to today has been long—and full of technical advances, innovative solutions, and interesting complications. Along the way, Java has flourished and is now one of the world's most important and widely-used programming environments.

Benjamin Evans, the Java editor for InfoQ and author of Java in a Nutshell, 6th edition, takes us on a journey through time:

• How Java has benefitted from early design decisions, including "Write Once, Run Anywhere" and an insistence on backward compatibility
• The impact of open source
• The enormous success and continued importance of the Java Virtual Machine and platform
• The rise of Enterprise Java
• The evolution of the Java developer community and ecosystem
• Java's continuing influence on new programming languages
• Java's greatest triumphs and most heroic failures
• The future of Java, including Java 9, Project Panama, Project Valhalla, and the Internet of Things