Book review : The Java Programming Language

This review covers The Java Programming Language, 4th ed. by Ken Arnold, James Gosling, and David Holmes. Stoughton, MA: Addison Wesley, 2006.

Summary
From the preface: “This book teaches the Java programming language to people who are familiar with basic programming concepts.”

The Good
Coverage: The book makes a great attempt at covering the basic topics you need an understanding of to make good use of the language.

Authority: The book’s description of how the language works is solid. (If, like me, you’ve ever experienced one of those programming books where the author’s statements about how the language works tend to be on the level of “I ran a simple test on my PC and hastily draw the general conclusion that it works like X, but I don’t know any of the edge cases or caveats”, you’ll appreciate this!)

Tone: The book’s tone is not condescending. Instruction and tips are presented in a respectful, matter-of-fact tone that doesn’t

Guidance: The book not only tells what’s possible with the language, but offers advice at times on what things might or might not be a good idea (for example, the subsections of 23.3 on Shutdown; and the footnotes on page 42, 206, 428).

Honesty: The authors aren’t afraid to occasionally say “Java does X because of a design error that at this point cannot be fixed”, or to note something that isn’t necessarily the cleanest but is there for historical reasons (examples: the spelling of Cloneable (section 3.9.1) and the footnotes on pages 85, 184, 326, 391, 408). I find that refreshing.

Shows where you need further study: For instance, in the second paragraph of section 14.10 talking about the Java memory model, the book’s explanation of when one thread’s change to a variable is or is not guaranteed to be visible to another thread with or without synchronization made me realize that I need to find a good book just on Java concurrency to master this area.

Helped me see the big picture: A lot of work has gone into the design of the Java language, and while there are a lot of details in the book, it didn’t neglect the big picture. The book helped me see some of the things the designers were trying to accomplish with the language.

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