Java immutable strings confusion

Question

If Strings are immutable in Java, then how can we write as:

String s = new String();
s = s + \"abc\";

Answer 1

The first answer is absolutely correct. You should mark it as answered.

s = s+"abc" does not append to the s object. it creates a new string that contains the characters from the s object (of which there are none) and "abc".

if string were mutable. it would have methods like append() and other such mutating methods that are on StringBuilder and StringBuffer.

Effective Java by Josh Bloch has excellent discussion on immutable objects and their value.