java introduction for pythonistas

[Alex Polite]

I've been working a few years with python. I'm  rather confident with
basic OO design principles. Now some people that I consult for might
be moving to Java. So I need to get up to speed with java. Are there
any good documents out there for people with a python background
coming to Java. 

I'm not so interested in syntactical questions (eg
"this is how we construct a for loop in python and this is how we do it
java") I'm more interested in OO design patterns that Java supports (I
know that it supports interfaces for one thing) that are not readily
available in python, and other important differences. Is it possible
to define new classes, functions, methods in Java? Are there even unbound
functions in Java? From the little I remember of that half Java
chapter I read years ago you have to define classes for everything
even for a print statement? These are the kind of questions I have.

alex


-- 

Alex Polite
http://plusseven.com/gpg