APress addressed me a complementary copy of Godfrey Nolan's latest title, "Decompiling Java". It was definitely a fun and instructive reading that I would recommend.

My 8-horseshoes review follows (also available at Javaranch.com):

Fascinated by the Java lady? Ever wanted to ask her out but never dared to? Get this book and take a shot. After discussing some legal and moral issues and telling you how to protect yourself, this book will teach you how to approach her and ask her out politely. Then, it will delve into the most intimate details of her bytecode attributes and show you how to manipulate them efficiently. Also, the author briefly describes a couple of free and commercial tools you can use to play with her. The book goes on describing techniques you can exploit to protect her sources from being seen by anyone. Such techniques include: obfuscation, encryption, server-side execution, digital rights management, fingerprinting, native implementation and many more. The second half of the book is fully dedicated to designing and implementing a working Java decompiler from scratch using the JLex and CUP (i.e., Java implementations of lex and yacc).

Basically, I very much appreciated the way I have been introduced to this wonderful and charming lady. Our chat was both enjoyable and enlightening. However, the date was over when the whole thing started to get interesting and I admit that 250 pages left me hungry. I would have liked to see a couple more concrete examples discussed and analyzed in minute details. Nonetheless, this book is a very good introduction to the topic and would satisfy both beginner and medium Java developers willing to peek beneath the lady's bytecode veil.