James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy Steele, Gilad Bracha. The Java™ Language Specification Second Edition. Tokyo, Addison-Wesley, 2000.

This document provides a comprehensive and definitive technical specification for the Java™ programming language, specifically the Second Edition. Written by the language's creators, it details the syntax and semantics of Java as a general-purpose, concurrent, class-based, and object-oriented language. The specification aims to ensure implementation independence, allowing developers to "write once, run anywhere" across the Internet with consistent results regardless of the underlying machine or implementation.