A couple of weeks ago, O'Reilly sent me a complimentary copy of the first edition of "Better Faster Lighter Java" by Bruce A. Tate and Justin Gehtland. I have just gulped it down and reading it was a great pleasure.

My 9-horseshoes review follows (also available at Javaranch.com):

Next year, Java will finally get a second digit in its age. Over the past 10 years, Java has become one of the most popular language on earth. Popularity is usually a positive sign but it often hides a double-edged sword as an ever increasing indigestible amalgam of (*cough* reusable *cough*) Java libraries/frameworks flood developers everyday. No one will argue that it becomes more and more difficult to make the right decisions when it comes to choosing existing libraries/frameworks for developing new products and/or refactoring older ones.

Don’t worry, you are not alone. Bruce Tate and Justin Gehtland have made a tremendous effort of vulgarizing some fundamental principles that, when applied consistently, can considerably ease your life. They introduce the following basic principles: "Keep it simple", "Do one thing and do it well", "Strive for transparency", "You are what you eat" and "Allow for extension". They also show how two famous open-source frameworks, Spring and Hibernate, elegantly apply these five principles. Finally, they take their own "better-faster-lighter-java" medication by applying it on the Simple Spider project and show how the latter can easily be integrated into the infamous jPetStore application.

I definitely enjoyed reading this book even though it is not necessarily about pure coding. However, I would like to warn entry-level programmers as they might not enjoy the occasional philosophical tone. As well, they might not have had the chance to be frustrated yet which is THE assumption the authors make.

I have just finished swallowing the second edition of the "Java Cookbook" by Ian F. Darwin. I'm really impressed with the result of the complete revision this book has undergone since the first version.

My 9-horseshoes review follows (also available at Javaranch.com):

Ever gotten tired of wading through endless reference books or crawling the web seeking for small code snippets that solve common and ever-recurring problems? Don't look further, this book is for you. In this second and revamped version of the Java Cookbook, you will find tons of very valuable resources for your everyday programming tasks. The author, a long-time practitioner, adopts a "learn-by-example" approach by providing small code recipes which cover almost all APIs from the 1.4 version as well as some new killer features of Java 5.

The number of subjects the author delves into is truly impressive. Apart from the traditional topics like effective string manipulation, threading, I18N and L10N, GUIs, RMI and networking, I/O and file system operations, and many more, the author also focuses on external devices and serial/parallel port programming, electronic mail, reflection and introspection, graphics and sound, pattern matching, generics, autoboxing, packaging and how to use Java with other languages.

I really enjoyed reading this very helpful resource and I would definitely recommend it to Java programmers of any level in urgent need of some code ammo to put in their backpack.