You can think of Java as a general-purpose, object-oriented language that looks a lot like C and C++, but which is easier to use and lets you create more robust programs.
Java is an interpreted language. At runtime, a Java program indirectly executes on the underlying platform (like Windows or Linux) via a virtual machine (which is a software representation of a hypothetical platform) and the associated execution environment. The virtual machine translates the Java program's bytecodes (instructions and associated data) to platform-specific instructions through interpretation. Interpretation is the act of figuring out what a bytecode instruction means and then choosing equivalent "canned" platform-specific instructions to execute. The virtual machine then executes those platform-specific instructions.
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