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97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts 1st Edition

by Kevlin Henney (Author), Trisha Gee (Author)
4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 46 ratings
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If you want to push your Java skills to the next level, this book provides expert advice from Java leaders and practitioners. You’ll be encouraged to look at problems in new ways, take broader responsibility for your work, stretch yourself by learning new techniques, and become as good at the entire craft of development as you possibly can.

Edited by Kevlin Henney and Trisha Gee, 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know reflects lifetimes of experience writing Java software and living with the process of software development. Great programmers share their collected wisdom to help you rethink Java practices, whether working with legacy code or incorporating changes since Java 8.

A few of the 97 things you should know:

  • "Behavior Is Easy, State Is Hard"―Edson Yanaga
  • “Learn Java Idioms and Cache in Your Brain”―Jeanne Boyarsky
  • “Java Programming from a JVM Performance Perspective”―Monica Beckwith
  • "Garbage Collection Is Your Friend"―Holly K Cummins
  • “Java's Unspeakable Types”―Ben Evans
  • "The Rebirth of Java"―Sander Mak
  • “Do You Know What Time It Is?”―Christin Gorman

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  1. ISBN-10
    1491952695
  2. ISBN-13
    978-1491952696
  3. Edition
    1st
  4. Publisher
    O'Reilly Media
  5. Publication date
    July 14, 2020
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    6 x 0.57 x 9 inches
  8. Print length
    267 pages
  9. See all details
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From the brand

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Kevlin Henney is an independent consultant and trainer. His work focuses on patterns and architecture, programming techniques and languages, and development process and practice. He has been a columnist for various magazines and online publications, including The Register, Better Software, Java Report, CUJ, and C++ Report. Kevlin is co-author of two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series: A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages. He also contributed to 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (July 14, 2020)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 267 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1491952695
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1491952696
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.3 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.57 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 46 ratings

About the authors

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  1. Kevlin Henney

    Kevlin Henney

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    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    I'm an independent consultant, international speaker, writer and trainer. I live in Bristol and online.

    My software development interests are in patterns, programming, practice and process. As well as contributing to a number of projects, I've been involved in (far too) many committees (for conferences, publications and standards, but as yet I've not been on a committee for committees).

    My fiction writing tends to the short side — and occasionally to the dark side — spanning a number of genres.

    See more on the author's page
  2. Trisha Gee

    Trisha Gee

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    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    Trisha has been working with Java since 1997, when her university was forward-looking enough to adopt this “shiny new” language to teach computer science. Since then, she’s worked as a developer and consultant, creating Java applications in a range of industries including banking, manufacturing, nonprofit, and low-latency financial trading.

    Trisha is super passionate about sharing all the stuff she learned the hard way during those years as a developer, so she became a Developer Advocate to give her an excuse to write blog posts, speak at conferences, and create videos to pass on some of her knowledge. She spent five years as a Java Developer Advocate at JetBrains, and another two years leading the JetBrains Java Advocacy team. During this time she learned a lot about the kinds of problems real Java developers face.

    See more on the author's page
  3. Heather VanCura

    Heather VanCura

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    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    Heather VanCura is a Vice President at Oracle, leading the Java Community Process (JCP) program and MySQL Community Outreach team. With 20+ years of experience at Oracle and Sun Microsystems, she actively engages with the developer community as an international speaker, event organizer, and mentor. She has visited six continents and over fifty countries meeting developers and helping them to engage in standards-related and open source projects. Heather is passionate about promoting diversity in technology and volunteers with organizations like Women Who Code and IEEE Women in Engineering. Her extensive involvement includes serving on the boards of Dress for Success and FIRST LEGO League NorCal. Heather's dedication to empowering developers and advocating for diversity makes her a respected leader in the industry.

    See more on the author's page
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Customer reviews

4 out of 5 stars
4 out of 5
46 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book for Junior Dev Book Club
Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2023
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We used this book as focus of small group discussions for junior devs. It was perfect. The chapters are easily consumed, not intimidating for the newly inducted. The short chapters and clear writing gave us a spring board for productive discussions about principled software engineering.
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Nilendu Misra
3.0 out of 5 stars Relatively weaker book in the "97 Things" Series
Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2020
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It is difficult to aggregate “collective wisdom from the experts” for programming languages with ever-changing landscapes. Either the advice veers strongly toward “my opinion from that experience 7 years ago” (stale) or generally accepted good practice, often obvious, like “encapsulate everything”. This is a relatively weaker book in the series. The “actionable idea density” is fairly low. About 15 of the items are generic hand waving, a similar number on low level constructs (coroutines, record, new Garbage Collection algorithm etc) and a handful meet the high standard of codifying in a book.

Some ideas, opinions and tips I got from the book -

As apps move to serverless architectures, where the deployment units can be single functions, the benefits we get from application frameworks diminish.

“We have to reinvent the wheel every once in a while, not because we need a lot of wheels; but because we need a lot of inventors”

Ergonomics of older JVMs are fooled when running inside docker containers.

Containers’ key benefit - reduce the coupling between an app and the underlying platform.

JVM ergonomics enables JVM to tune itself by looking at two env metrics - (i) number of CPUs and (ii) available memory.

Behavior is easy, state is hard - offer only a carefully designed API surface for any state mutation. Hardest bugs are caused by inconsistent state.

One of the advantages of being a job hopper is that “I’ve seen the way many different teams work”.

Developer Productivity Engineering - practice and philosophy of improving developer experience through data.

Actor model reduces the consequences of mutable state by preventing sharing, and functional programming makes the state shareable by prohibiting mutation. Functional programs can be less efficient than imperative equivalents and may place a bigger burden on GC. Functions facilitate the use of reactive programming paradigm consisting in asynchronous processing of stream of events.

Countdownlatch is a powerful tool but blocks the current thread. Different concurrency models don’t play well together.

Imperative - code explicitly telling the computer what to do. Declarative - code expressing a goal abstracting over the way in which the goal is achieved.

You aren’t paid to write code. Change your focus from writing code to delivering software. Your job is designing change, not code. Code is a detail. Designing change means feature flags

Localizing the scope of anything that is variable into a supporting method makes the top-level code predictable. Broadly, trying to lock down anything that does not vary makes you think more carefully about design and flushes out potential bugs.

Embrace SQL thinking - the biggest failing of applied OO programming is the belief that you should faithfully reproduce your domain model in code. It leads to unnecessary classes. SQL is declarative and is a data DSL.

In the early 2000s, most Java developers were actually full-stack developers - they just did not know because the phrase had not yet been coined!

Heap access is geologically slow compared to instruction processing, so modern computers use caches.

Java profilers use either byte code instrumentation or sampling. Flame graph sorts and aggregates the traces up to each stack level.

Uncertainty is when we cannot quantify the risk.
Risk = (Likelihood of Failure X Worst-case impact of Failure)

Playing the lottery is low-risk, Free solo climbing is high risk.

Large, infrequent releases are riskier. There is no way to reduce the impact of a failure - the worst case is still the ENTIRE system down and incur severe data loss, but we lower the likelihood of failure with smaller releases.

Naming is important - Orwell said - “the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them”.

Technical classes (e.g., Hashmap) rarely have a place in the vocabulary of the domains we’re working in. The need for utility classes should be a red flag that you’re missing an abstraction.

Try to crash your JVM to learn deep stuff - e.g., try using Unsafe to get access to low-level stuff (e.g., memory management)

Cost of going to RAM, relative to registers, kept growing.Thus, cache-friendly code is a much researched area.

Fun can have different faces - Exploration (focused investigation); Play (no goal, for its own sake); Puzzles (rules with a goal); Games (rules with a winner) and Work (satisfying goal).
Kintsugi is a Japanese art where a precious broken object - rather than thrown away - is put back together using gold powder along its cracking lines. We should similarly learn how to fix legacy code that should make us similarly proud.

Package-by-layer structure (e.g., tld.domain.project.controllers, ..model, ..service etc) for your classes requires a lot of methods to be public. In order to benefit from package-private access protection, package-by-feature package hierarchy is a better organizing principle (e.g., tld.domain.project.company, ..user etc). The latter reduces coupling.

Service hedging - multiple idempotent calls to identically configured service instances on discrete nodes are launched and all but the fastest response discarded.

Boolean literals are worse than hard coded numbers - a 42 in code might look familiar, but a “false” could be anything and anything could be false.

Classes that represent Value objects don’t need getters or setters. Why Java 14 introduced a record structure.

Marginality : what is the average diminishing marginal return of adding developers to a team?

Programmers writing automated tests suffer from positive test bias. Fuzz testing is an unreasonably effective technique for negative testing that is easy to include in automated test suites.

Comment only what the code cannot say. Code says “what”, comments should say “why”.
10 people found this helpful
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PATRICK SWEENEY
5.0 out of 5 stars Met expectations - diverse stories on Java for the people who love Java
Reviewed in the United States on November 21, 2020
Verified Purchase
This is a book to read, mark up, and pass around you team. Some of the "things" are purely technical and quirky (43 Java's Unspeakable Types) and stuff you should be using and probably are not (47 Know Thy Flatmap). There's 97 of them, so they don't all need to be home runs.
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Sherman P. Winkledink
5.0 out of 5 stars I KNOW JAVA
Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2021
Verified Purchase
I was able to get a job at a FAANG company and have put my entire family in 4 bedroom houses across the bay area. This book is a life changer!
One person found this helpful
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Piotr Dzioba
3.0 out of 5 stars Like collection of the blog posts
Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2022
Verified Purchase
Book is jumping from topic to topic and chosen ones here are IMHO no the most important ones. The limitation of the length deficated to each topic makes it more a collection of 97 blog posts so it has limited education value.
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Kindle Customer
1.0 out of 5 stars Obvious and not worth the money
Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2020
Verified Purchase
Almost all the "tips" we're either obvious or worthless. I doubt if more than a handful had any value.
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nskmda
3.0 out of 5 stars Not really worth the money
Reviewed in the United States on December 8, 2022
Apologies, I couldn't help ranting about this a bit.

Granted, the price is not too high, but no... sorry... 'absotively negalutely' (c) it's not a reading worth this money. It might work as a refresher but it's definitely not a deskbook you go to every day.

The content might be [roughly] grouped under the following categories:
- obvious/apparent/widely known/platitude,
- something specific to an expert's area of interest,
- generic whole software development industry topics

First, I'm not sure what audience the editors tried to target.
Junior developers might not get the points experts are trying to convey.
Senior developers will find that as a well known widely accepted approach.

Second, some of the points are not even relevant to Java per se. They are general/generic topics. And some of them are not even about software development but rather about deployment environments/configurations/change management.

The book title is somewhat misleading. Collective wisdom is about 'a single point multiple experts agreeing on' vs 'multiple points with single expert agreeing on each'. And this is what the books is about: a collection of single expert's single/few topics opinions/experiences.

P.S. It's a review of an (awful) Java developer with mere 25 years of experience.
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Top reviews from other countries

Carlos Saltos
5.0 out of 5 stars Why I did not find it before !!
Reviewed in Germany on November 27, 2020
Verified Purchase
A good book for nowadays development and not only for Java (Scala and other JVM languages can be included too). I love the sharing of so many experiences of such great people. The book is gold !!
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Amrut P.
1.0 out of 5 stars Nothing Great
Reviewed in Germany on November 7, 2021
Verified Purchase
There is nothing great to read in this book. The topic are really basic and you might have already heard of these via conference videos.
Better spend the 35 euros on other books.
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