Presents your 
JAVA E-NEWSLETTER for January 9, 2003

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MASTER MATHEMATICS WITH JAVA.LANG.MATH

Before creating your own simple mathematic functions, be aware that they
may already exist in the java.lang.Math class. While Math is an obvious
place to find such painful-to-code functions as sine, cosine, tangent,
logarithm, and square root, it also contains many easy to implement
functions.

One such function is the Math.abs(int) function. Given a number, it will
return the absolute value for that number. Math.abs is overloaded for
integer, float, double, and long.

One set of commonly used functions are max and min. Given two numbers,
the Math.min function will return the lower of the two, and the Math.max
function will return the higher.

Another set of common functions is made up of ceiling, floor, and round.
These functions are used to turn a decimal number into an integer
number; that is, the functions lose the part after the decimal point. 
Floor will return the integer part, ceiling returns the integer part + 1, 
and round adds on one if the decimal part is above 0.5.

The toDegrees and toRadians functions were added in JDK 1.2 and perform
the simple task of converting an angle measured in degrees into an 
angle measured in radians, and vice versa.

Rather than doing mathematical functions, use java.lang.Math. It might
save development time, save debugging time, and decrease the size of 
your project.

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