This example should help you understand ... same behavior from any other mutable object in Java. Don’t try to change an immutable value by reference. Don’t try to change a primitive variable ...

In a previous Java 101 tutorial, you learned how to better organize your code by declaring reference types (also known as classes and interfaces) as members of other reference types and blocks.

Java provides a way for the programmer ... and you can keep track of which objects have been reclaimed using a reference queue. The example in Listing A could easily be rewritten to work as ...

The default constructor in Java takes no arguments -- it simply initializes reference types to null and primitive types to the binary equivalent of zero. That means instance variables are assigned as ...