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My first thought when I saw this new book on O’Reilly’s web site was: "Well, there must be some really cool Java hacks hidden behind this rather evocative title."
Basically, it’s one of those books where you expect the next page to actually delve into the real matter and give you some crispy details. My personal impression after finishing it was that the content was a little lightweight for deserving to be qualified as “hardcore”, but maybe I’m being too harsh. The author handles a good deal of “advanced” topics, such as the effective use of Collections and nested classes, constants, immutable types, reflection, proxies and the four different flavors of references. Also qualified as hardcore, the novelties introduced by the upcoming Java 1.5 release are also part of the story...
I have always regarded O’Reilly’s books as high-quality work (and I still do), but I have never been able to find 50 typos in any of their books before. I’m inclined to interpret this fact as if the book had been rushed to press to be on the shelves before JDK 1.5 comes out. I just wish the book had been more thoroughly proofread.
On a more positive note, I’m quite sure medium and advanced Java programmers will be able to distill valuables tips and tricks from this book. On the companion web site, the author also provides the sources of all the examples illustrated in the book.
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