This document provides an introduction to the Java programming language, including its history, key concepts, and characteristics. It describes how Java was created in the early 1990s at Sun Microsystems to enable programming for the internet and be platform independent. The document outlines the core object-oriented programming concepts in Java like encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism. It also details Java's main characteristics such as being simple, secure, portable and having good performance. The life cycle of a Java program from writing source code to compilation and execution is summarized. Finally, a simple Java program is shown as an example.