>During the process of the class instantiation...
>"Constructors have the following characteristics:
>They are called only once when the class is being >instantiated."

Should read:
"During the process of the object instantiation..."
Classes are not instantiated!*. You should not confuse objects with classes - Your confusion can cause alot of harm when writing such articles.

*In OO languages like smallltalk where everthing is an object classes are in fact objects - but even then they are refered to as meta-objects.In java classes are loaded.

As a web article I don''t have a problem with it. And as such I retract my previous comments.

My initial thought was this that this article was going to wind up in the printed publication which has precious limited column space. And IMO should be reserved for articles of interest to actual Java developers. After all that''s (part of) the name of the publication.

If you''re miles above this article, you probably can''t spare the time to mentor someone. Do them a favor and forward this article to them. I certainly hope there are others out there climbing the Java learning curve. Having done so myself in 1999 feeling surrounded by a group of selfish xenophobic primadonnas (a programmer personality profile it took a long time to get over), I welcomed this type of tutorial for it''s clarity and lack of a condescending attitude. In the end, it was Bruce Eckel''s ''Thinking in Java'' that breezed me through the certification exam.

This is to Tim Lambert

The short answer to your question is, "yes".

The slightly longer answer is: I think we have a right to train, encourage and empower developers at ALL levels. From personal experience the only way I could get information on learning Java was on the net and looking at, what are now, early copies of JDJ.

I understand your point of view but JDJ is for the entire community and not just focused on seasoned developers (though you guys are very important). We receive article proposals at all levels. My previous editorials have been quite strong on the learning element, encouraging developers to train and mentor other developers. I believe we all have something to share that could be a benefit to someone else.

Tim, if you don''t mind me asking. What sort of articles are you looking for? User feedback from the web site and the print publication are always welcome.

As a final note, Scott McNealy said that Sun''s target was 10 Million developers. These developers need to start somewhere and I think here is a good place to start.

Kind regards
Jason Bell
Core and Internals Editor: Java Developers Journal

Lambert,

JDJ has readers of all levels.

Please take a look at the following URL:

[visit link]

During the last month more than 900 people read the article
called "Your First Java program".

I''ll be happy if more and more people will learn and start using Java. I might dissapoint you even more, but currently I''m writing a book on Java programming for kids. In this book I''m explaining how to create a class Pet and its subclass Fish. Sorry...

You''ve got to be kidding.

Is the target audience of JDJ people who have no clue about the very basics of Java?

How about probing some topics that are of interest to the professional Java developer.

You''re absolutely right, but this series of articles is written as a tutorial, and Java packages were not explained yet. But I do promise to tell the whole truth about protected access level in one of the future articles.

The keyword protected makes the element "visible" either from the current class, or from it''s subclasses.

that''s not the whole truth - the elememts are visible from the classes in the same package as well