Joshua Bloch (1) (1961–)

This book alone made me a better Java programmer. Period.


Pros:
* It's presented by items, so no need to read it sequentially;
* Contains a glimpse on the intricacies of the Java language;
* Contains code examples on 'why do this, but not that';
And more importantly,
* You'll probably consider things that never even crossed your mind (or at least, not mine).

Cons
* It's geared towards Java 2 and... Java 7 has just came out. In my eyes, it doesn't make it less valuable though.


Even though I just show more finished the first edition, I'm seriously considering buying the last one. I liked THAT much. show less

This book not only provides gems of advice for core Java programming but also for programming in general, especially if your code will be provided as an API to other programmers and if it is going to live for more than a few months.

Another interesting aspect of the book is that the more I contemplate upon it, the more it resembles like advocacy for functional programming. At least some parts really made me think like "hmm, that would be considered natural in Scala" (insert your favorite show more functional programming language here, even if it's not purely functional in the strictest academic sense). The book is also helpful if you've spent long time in high level languages such as Python or Lisp before coming to Java, and are curious about how you can get an approximation of some of their good parts such as optional named arguments.

The foreword of Guy L. Steele, Jr. says it all: after learning the vocabulary and grammar of a language you need to master the pragmatics of it rooted in real life cases so that your communication with other language speakers will smooth flowly. Bloch's book helps you with that effectively and I think every programming language deserves at least one author of Bloch's calibre. show less

Joshua Bloch, once a developer for Sun (and in fact one of the primary authors of the Java Collections API), guides you through a series of enlightening "Dos and Don'ts" about the Java programming language. The book is broken up into short items, with each item containing evidence, examples, and a good conversational explanation of the item. It's a great deal thinner than its C-language counterpart, but don't let that dissuade you from the purchase; Bloch will save you a ton of time reading show more through the JLS, or learning these lessons the hard way. I keep a copy in my work desk for reference, and even if you've been programming Java for years, it's likely you'll learn something. show less

This book is like Effective C by Scott Meyers, but for Java.

The book is formatted at a series of tips, broken into categories such as concurrency, designing methods, handling exceptions, and implementing C constructs. I found the book extremely useful. I do not have much Java experience, and I had to write some code in Java. This book helped me write code that is, hopefully, idiomatically and well as syntactically Java. (It also helped me relearn how to actually program in Java, but, shhh, show more that's a secret.) show less