Will learning Java SE 5 now be relevant to SE 6, 7 and the up-coming 8?
<p>I am wanting to learn Java, particularly for Android development since I am getting a new tablet but also for many of the other things Java can do (Struts, network development, JWebSockets, and others). I am a fairly experienced developer with PHP, Javascript and .NET, mostly (I would say I am about an intermediate coder). </p>

<p>My issue is that I prefer to learn from books since I feel they give a more all-inclusive learning experience than trying to patch together a whole bunch of tutorials. I also just enjoy reading technical books! However, I have found a book that looks good to me at a discount book store near me called "Learning Java, 3rd Ed." by Niemeyer and Knudsen. It looks like exactly what I am looking for since it doesn't seem to be a beginner book that spends 500+ pages explaining OO, variables and methods. But it is for Java SE 5!</p>

<p>So now there is a Java SE 6 version, SE 7 and I think there is even a beta of SE 8. How far behind would it put me to learn the Java class library (and generally how to program Java) of Java SE 5? </p>

<p>I found this question: <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5657042/how-difficult-is-it-to-learn-java-se-6-from-j2se-5-0">How difficult is it to learn Java SE 6 from J2SE 5.0?</a> but it seems that it was only referring to Java SE 5 vs. SE 6. But now there will soon be 2 more versions beyond that. I have also looked over feature lists of new versions, but without knowing the language better, I can't really tell how important the new versions are, or if they are mostly syntactic sugar. At the best, will I just need to maybe read some tutorials for upgrading developers, or at worst, would my SE 5 code break in SE 6, 7 or 8? Any and all help is appreciated! </p>
