Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Raves for the First Edition!

“I sure wish I had this book ten years ago. Some might think that I don’t need any Java books, but I need this one.”

–James Gosling, fellow and vice president, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

“An excellent book, crammed with good advice on using the Java programming language and object-oriented programming in general.”

–Gilad Bracha, coauthor of The Java™ Language Specification, Third Edition

“10/10–anyone aspiring to write good Java code that others will appreciate reading and maintaining should be required to own a copy of this book. This is one of those rare books where the information won’t become obsolete with subsequent releases of the JDK library.”
–Peter Tran, bartender, JavaRanch.com

“The best Java book yet written.... Really great; very readable and eminently useful. I can’t say enough good things about this book. At JavaOne 2001, James Gosling said, ‘Go buy this book!’ I’m glad I did, and I couldn’t agree more.”
–Keith Edwards, senior member of research staff, Computer Science Lab at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and author of Core JINI (Prentice Hall, 2000)

“This is a truly excellent book done by the guy who designed several of the better recent Java platform APIs (including the Collections API).”
–James Clark, technical lead of the XML Working Group during the creation of the XML 1.0 Recommendation, editor of the XPath and XSLT Recommendations

“Great content. Analogous to Scott Meyers’ classic Effective C++. If you know the basics of Java, this has to be your next book.”
–Gary K. Evans, OO mentor and consultant, Evanetics, Inc

“Josh Bloch gives great insight into best practices that really can only be discovered after years of study and experience.”
–Mark Mascolino, software engineer

“This is a superb book. It clearly covers many of the language/platform subtleties and trickery you need to learn to become a real Java master.”
–Victor Wiewiorowski, vice president development and code quality manager, ValueCommerce Co., Tokyo, Japan

“I like books that under-promise in their titles and over-deliver in their contents. This book has 57 items of programming advice that are well chosen. Each item reveals a clear, deep grasp of the language. Each one illustrates in simple, practical terms the limits of programming on intuition alone, or taking the most direct path to a solution without fully understanding what the language offers.”

–Michael Ernest, Inkling Research, Inc.

“I don’t find many programming books that make me want to read every page–this is one of them.”
–Matt Tucker, chief technical officer, Jive Software

“Great how-to resource for the experienced developer.”
–John Zukowski, author of numerous Java technology books

“I picked this book up two weeks ago and can safely say I learned more about the Java language in three days of reading than I did in three months of study! An excellent book and a welcome addition to my Java library.”
–Jane Griscti, I/T advisory specialist

Are you looking for a deeper understanding of the Java™ programming language so that you can write code that is clearer, more correct, more robust, and more reusable? Look no further! Effective Java™, Second Edition, brings together seventy-eight indispensable programmer’s rules of thumb: working, best-practice solutions for the programming challenges you encounter every day.

This highly anticipated new edition of the classic, Jolt Award-winning work has been thoroughly updated to cover Java SE 5 and Java SE 6 features introduced since the first edition. Bloch explores new design patterns and language idioms, showing you how to make the most of features ranging from generics to enums, annotations to autoboxing.

Each chapter in the book consists of several “items” presented in the form of a short, standalone essay that provides specific advice, insight into Java platform subtleties, and outstanding code examples. The comprehensive descriptions and explanations for each item illuminate what to do, what not to do, and why.

Highlights include:

• New coverage of generics, enums, annotations, autoboxing, the for-each loop, varargs, concurrency utilities, and much more
• Updated techniques and best practices on classic topics, including objects, classes, libraries, methods, and serialization
• How to avoid the traps and pitfalls of commonly misunderstood subtleties of the language
• Focus on the language and its most fundamental libraries: java.lang, java.util, and, to a lesser extent, java.util.concurrent and java.io

Simply put, Effective Java™, Second Edition, presents the most practical, authoritative guidelines available for writing efficient, well-designed programs.

Average Customer Rating:

A must have for practicing engineers	Customer Rating:
A great book that you'll go back to time and again as you encounter the various scenarios addressed in the book. I recommend scanning the TOC every few months to see what's suddenly relevant because of your current project. A great companion to Java Concurrency in Practice.

Fixing your programming style	Customer Rating:
Greatest Java book ever written. In fact, it's beyond a 'java book', once many tips from here are 'universal tips'. It's a great book for those who already have at least 4 or 5 programming years (code enough different projects), 'cause you'll notice several (apparently) minor mistakes that everyone make everyday.

Essential Java

Customer Rating:

Did you realize that enums can implement interfaces? That the simplest safe way to implement a singleton is using an enum? That it's possible to obtain an object reference to a private member using serialization? There are lots of ways to learn the language basics and figure out how to use the libraries. But nowhere do you have such a dense collection of non-obvious, yet important issues that any Java developer ought to be aware of. The book is written from the perspective of someone who creates public APIs, so there is a lot of obsessing over how to prevent users from doing things they shouldn't (intentionally, or not). But even if that's not a big concern for you, it's nevertheless important to be aware of the issues. Having read the first edition a while back, reading the second edition was more that a good refresher -- it's almost a different book. This is in part thanks to Java 5, which has made a lot of the original items (e.g. how create enumerations) obsolete, while introducing the need for a whole new set of items (e.g. regarding the use of generics).

All Java programmers should read this book	Customer Rating:
This book is a must-read for all Java programmers. In fact, I think every programmer should read this book before they start programming Java. The book is full of good advice, best practices and guidelines. Highly recommended

Excellent book	Customer Rating:
Absolute classic, definitely my favorite Java book. Every professional Java developer should have it on her/his desk. It's not the easiest book and shouldn't be read if You are novice in Java, there better books to get started with Java, but for experienced developers, this book is invaluable.