8. Sockets, Files, and Streams

Overview

This chapter will teach you to work with external data storage systems. In the early sections, you will be taken through how to list the contents of directories—the logical first step to learning to create, open, read, and write to external files using Java. From there, you will study different methods, buffered and unbuffered, and how to distinguish between them. You will then learn to identify two main application programming interfaces (APIs), java.io and java.nio, their respective relationship to the aforementioned methods, and when and where to use them. In this chapter's final activity, you will be asked to use all these Java skills and tools in order to communicate between two different programs running on remote computers, in preparation for the chapters to come.