Customer Reviews

Java 2 Performance and Idiom Guide

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book was very reminiscent of Effective C++. It allows a developer who is experienced, but just moving to Java, to get a jump start on how to effectively use the language. Even though most of the information was familiar to me, I wish I would have had a book like this when I began using Java. A great distillation of experience!

Erik

This book is moderately useful if you are relatively new to Java -- with two months of active work in a Java environment most everything in it should seem like common sense. For a beginner just after learning the language syntax, I would recommend it. For someone with, say, a years experience -- given the price -- this book would be a waste of money. Since that's pretty much a match with the authors' claims, I don't fault the book for that. My only real complaint is that the performance section is just plain weak.

One word of warning: this book should not under any circumstances be compared to the Scott Meyers C++ books. Those books are really indispensible no matter what your level of experience and deal in depth with language issues that are not obvious and often new features of the language standard.

This book is not highly organized, reading more like an almanac than a textbook, but I think that is a plus here. I bought the book for the performance section, and picked up a couple things that only a guru would pick up on their own (e.g. the fact that Strings recalc their hash key every time). By cruising through all the points it helps reinforce your existing knowlege of to-do's and not to-do's, as well as comparing tradeoffs of similar choices. I ended up with some added confidence for my "common sense" programming practices, and some very valuable insight in some unfamiliar areas.

The downside is that this hardcover book is expensive for it quantity of content, and doesn't lend itself well to revisions. I actually like the brevity and white space, but I was able to browse the entire performance section is about 90-min. A perfect handbook! A pricy textbook.

I would have preferred to buy a cheap paperback version that might benefit from yearly revisions (like The Java Developer's Almanac), especially since I'm sure new revelations of performance tuning will materialize as the Java language matures and grows. Also, the book only covers general Java performance, touching on RMI, AWT, and Collections, but really staying close to the java.lang package... I'm sure there is a lot that could have been covered in specific API's (Java 2D, 3D, JDBC, etc.)

Overall this book is a keeper! Strong praise since even after being very picky about spending my book money I still end up trashing 50% of the books I buy.

I look forward to future expanded (and cheaper) editions.

This is the book we all wish we had read a year or two or three ago. It is all the wisdom of an experienced Java programmer written down so that you can learn it in a hurry. If you are an experienced Java programmer, you may not agree with it all (but mostly you will), and you may have more to add, but if you give this book to your workmates who are not experienced, it will do them the world of good.

Reading this book will confirm what you already know, and probably give you a few tips as well. Given the very introductory standard of most Java books around, I rate this as one of the very few worth your time.

Although the word "performance" is in the title, the main goal of this book is to provide a set of best practices and code samples (idioms) that allow correct Java programs to be written quickly and easily. The authors explain the parts of Java that give intermediate Java programmers the most trouble, and that many programmers learn only from years of painful experience. This book will allow a Java programmer who has mastered the basics of the language to quickly progress to an expert Java developer.

Interestingly, this book has exactly the same weaknesses as another Java style book I recently read -- the double-checked locking idiom is incorrectly described as thread-safe, the fact the null is a valid value for enumerations implemented as classes is not mentioned, and nested classes are referred to as inner classes. But when I take into consideration how long this book is, I'm surprised there are so few errors.

The best way to read this book is slowly and carefully. Even when I thought I already understood a point the authors were making, I picked up subtleties by examining the code closely and re-reading the description of how it works. Writing correct Java programs is often tricky, and only the most experienced Java developers will not learn something from this book.

I found some of the idioms to be fairly useful, yet disagreed with a number of assertions, which is OK. The real problem is that there really wasn't a lot of new information regarding performance. And as far as the non-performance idioms, the Kent Beck Smalltalk Patterns book is more useful, as another reviewer suggested. In fact, I found a more thorough treatment of Java idioms in a book called Essential Java Style, which used the Beck book as its basis.

The look and feel of the book is indeed horrid, by the way.

Not for beginners. This book has a lot of tips which can be applied to your projects to better improve the performance. And it help you to write high quality(at least at the code review level) Java code. ROI on this book for me is at least 1000%(no mistake!) during the first week I purchased this book.

They really should release a 2nd edition with new techniques, and remove the old, disproven stuff (double-checked locking works???). We're on the brink of Java 1.5, this book is pure 1.1.

Spend your money on Effective Java by Joshua Bloch. Same style of book, much higher timeliness.

I've been waiting for a book that covers Java coding in a way that pushes beyond the intro material. This is actually a pretty advanced book that most Java developers will find very readable and concise. I've been doing Java for over 2 years and found quite a few things that will improve my skills. The only negative comments are the large amount of blank space, very large type and quite a few obvious typos.

I have 2 years Java experience. I learned very little of value about performance optimization of my code, very little about performant design idioms, and nothing about performance issues in large Java systems. I agree with the earlier comment about "big type and lots of white space". If you want coding style help, get Kent Beck's book on Smalltalk patterns and apply it to your Java. My overall mileage was pretty low.