Hardcore Java

If you are serious about developing a mindset to becoming a better programmer, this is a very good book. To profit from it one has to actively engage with the ideas and material presented. No cookbook here. It is truly unfortunate that so many reviews are so disparaging; it may be the reviewers were looking for a cookbook approach, and that of course is not what this book is about. If you are prepared to learn, this book has a lot to teach.

Most books that I have deal mostly with APIs. You have books on beans and security and so on. If you take out the API documentation, half of the book is gone. What Simmons does is clearly pack a great deal of information into a small volume. He has many techniques that will improve your life as a developer by improving the quality of your code. In fact, I would say that code quality is the focus of the book. I disagree with the hostile tone of other reviewers who found a couple of errata. It is true that there are some errata in the book, but you find erata in all first editions of any book as dense and technical as this. I am sure all ofthese issues will be cleaned up in later releases of the book. If you judge boks to be good only if you cant find a mistake in the book, then you can exclude most technical books in print. When you find a mistake, the best thing to do is submit it, not whine about it in public.Overall, I think the book is definitely worth your money. You will learn many tactics that will help your programming and the book will pay for itself in terms of time spent finding annoying bugs and memory leaks.

This book should be required reading for anyone who calls themselves a Java programmer. The idea behind the book is to re-introduce engineers to the entire flavor of the Java language. Chapter one shows basic language elements like short-circuited if statements. Chapter two covers using the final keyword. Chapter six is an excellent introduction to using inner classes. This is one of the best chapters in the book.Chapter eight is a very interesting combination of a theoretical discussion on data modeling and a hardcore technical discussion on object modeling. The chapter ends with a brief bit about JDO.Chapter nine is a short but nice coverage of reflection. Chapter eleven is a great, and I mean great, introduction to weak and strong references.The book finishes with an introduction to Tiget (JDK 1.5), mainly in the area of generics. It's a solid introduction, but it's short.This is a great book. It's a must read for Java programmers.

The author is certainly spot on about saying his book is not for Java beginners. What Simmons tries is to take you beyond the scope of most Java books, that first have to teach syntax. He assumes you are quite comfortable with Java. But he discusses topics that may give you a deeper understanding.He starts off simply enough, by emphasising that you should use "final" where ever it is made possible by the logic behind your code. The idea is to push a bug that might violate the logic into being found at compile time rather than at run time. Amongst later topics is proxies. You might be familiar with these, in CORBA, EJB and RMI. But of all the Java texts I have read, Simmons has the clearest, most lucid explanation of proxies. A simple description that cuts through the necessarily detailed clutter often used elsewhere. There are chapters of other books, and indeed entire books, on each of CORBA, EJB and RMI. But in the involved explanations of each, though the term proxy may be used, there is often lacking a simple unifying description, encompassing all three.Simmons also has a chapter on References, which are often neglected. This may be the hardest chapter to understand. But potentially the most useful, in minimising your memory footprint.

The author makes the point in the preface that this book is intended for an intermediate to advanced audience. I'm coming from c++ with some limited Java experience and this book is quite readable for me.(I'm only up to page 42, but understanding everything..) His code examples are well done. I think the value of this book is in all the little gotchas you might otherwise have to learn about at the debug stage. Funny how many of the subtle issues from c++ show up in java, only manifesting themselves somewhat differently. This book has stuff from jdk 1.4 like assert and shows how to take advantage of it. Simmons exhibits techniques that make for more elegant, less redundant code. If you've been programming in java for less than a year or two I'm sure this book is worth your time.