Skip to main content

The Java Programming Language

Image
By
By Ken Arnold, James Gosling, David Holmes
ISBN: 978-0321349804

I decided to read this book about 18 months after having to learn Java in a hurry after discovering what I had been lead to believe was a C# role turned out to be a Java role. Despite several years of programming in C++ and C# I figured there must be lots of stuff that was different in Java and that this book would be a good way to find out. The first chapter is a 40 page general introduction to Java and I found it such a dry read that I gave up. Then, twelve months later, I decided I really should read it cover to cover to find out what I was missing and it took me five months to do it!

Although solid and reasonable well written the book is a dry read most of the way through. The chapter on streams is especially hard going. Although in many cases each method of a class being discussed is described in detail, this book represents a medium level (as opposed to high or low level) introduction to the language. As you would expect it covers classes, interfaces, inheritance, polymorphism, enums, control flow, generics, threading, reflection, etc. so you do get a good overview of the language. However it does not go into any detail about how to compile or run Java programs, neither does it mention ANT or describe how to create JARs. If you want a practical tutorial, this is not the book for you.

I didn't agree with a lot of the “good coding style” suggestions such as using a fall through comment in switch blocks to tell the reader of the code what he should already know the language does or using continue in a bodiless for loop as a semi-colon may get deleted or forgotten. Many people, including myself and the creators of the spring library, believe that checked exceptions are a bad thing in most cases and should not have been added to the lanuguage, so I find bad advice like “Nearly all exceptions you create should extend Exception, making them checked exceptions” appalling. There are a number of examples of poor practice throughout the exceptions chapter.

Overall I think most Java developers would benefit from reading this book just to plug a few of the inevitable gaps in their knowledge. It is hard going, but worth it. As it covers Java 1.5 and Java 1.7 is nearly upon is, it would certain benefit from an update and a review of good programming practice.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Remember to Delegate: The Triangle of Trust

By
So you think you can lead a team? I’ve been talking and writing a lot about leading a software engineering team in 2025. I started thinking about it more deeply the year before when I decided to give a colleague, who was moving into team leading, some advice: 'Doing the work' isn't the only way to add value Remember to delegate Pick your battles Talk to your team every day Out of this came a talk, “So you think you can lead a team?” which I gave at work, at meetups and at conferences in various different formats during the first quarter of 2025. Here I am looking at Remember to Delegate and an idea which came out of discussion around the talk, The Triangle of Trust, in more detail. Delegate Delegation is a crucial skill for any team lead, yet it is often one of the most challenging aspects of leadership to master. Many leaders, particularly those who have risen through the ranks as individual contributors, struggle to let go of tasks, fearing a loss of control or a dip in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...
22 comments
Read more