Effective Java™ Second Edition: Worth the wait?

Yes, I have been horribly impatient for Joshua Bloch to update his fantastic “Effective Java™” for the last few years. There is so much potential for new effective idioms in Java 5, and I couldn’t wait to see Bloch’s recommendations and insights.

Well, the new edition’s been out for a few weeks, and I am happily making my way through it. The wait was painful, but a worthy update has been the result. So far the best major new content has been the chapter on Generics. I really wish I’d had this two years ago, it would have saved me hours of pain trying to figure out some of the subtleties for myself, from scattered sources and cryptic compiler errors.

So, definitely, pick up a copy of the new edition and read it all again, making up for lost time.

A Happy Reader

Ryan noticed a very nice review of Harnessing Hibernate on Amazon this Friday. I don’t think we could have hired someone to do as nice a job of reacting to the approach we took to the book—even the Stripes section which had made Ryan a little nervous during tech review, because it is a bit of a stretch beyond the core topics in the first half of the book. But we’re evidently not the only people who enjoy that lightweight web framework after even a brief exposure.