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Java Puzzlers
Kylar writes "When you have spare time and decide to do something with a book (That's like an analog webpage, for the neuronauts among us), how often do you turn to a computer related book? How often has it happened in the last year? Right. The problem being that computer books are often either: a) boring, b) difficult to read, c) poorly written, or possibly: d) made of cheese." Read on for the rest of Kylars' review.
Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases - Java Puzzlers
author
Joshua Bloch, Neal Gafter
pages
282
publisher
Addison-Wesley
rating
9 out of 10
reviewer
Tom Byrne
ISBN
0-321-33678-X
summary
95 Corner cases and traps that any serious java developer should be aware of (or entertained by.)
Java Puzzlers is none of the above(*), being well written, amusing, whimsical, and above all, informative. Bloch and Gafter have brought us a book that entertains us with corner-cases, one-in-a-million chances and other happenings that explore the ins, outs, and guts of the Java Programming Language.
Anyone who has been a serious java programmer in the last several years should know the name Josh Bloch, and more importantly, should have read his book Effective Java. Josh, acting as java's platform architect has been directing and guiding Java into it's current incarnation as a mature, robust (Cue the laughter from the peanut gallery) programming language.
This book primarily references the Java 1.5 programming language, and some of the puzzles are 1.5-specific, although a significant portion of the problems are applicable to previous versions. Also, this book is aimed towards people who are competent-to-expert java programmers, and although there is a lot of good information, people who are new to Java will probably be a bit lost. As it stands, I have 7 years of Java experience, and I was only able to figure out about 15% of the puzzles without resorting to code, or more frequently the answer. The reason that I didn't stop to try out most of these problems is that the book is eminently readable, and difficult to put down (unusual for a computer book, and doubly so for one that delves deeply into a language specification document.)
This book dives into a lot of esoteric bits of the Java Language Specification, also known as "The Big Paper That Sometimes Tells Us Why Java Acts Like That," and there are lots of bits in there that don't even make sense, let alone seem intuitive.
Divided into 10 parts, each part presents a series of different code problems that usually present a small method or class that looks innocuous, but in reality exposes a piece of behavior that is strange, spectacular, or, more often, completely confusing. The book exposes flaws in the language, including one of my personal pet peeves, their inability to have a consistent Date object, and this is noted in Puzzle 62 by my favorite line in the book: "The lesson for API designers is: If you can't get it right the first time, at least get it right the second..."
One topic that I found was a continually recurring theme had to do with handling primitives and what happens when they are cast into different types. Java provides a lot of ways to deal with primitives, and for the most part, they play nicely with each other. There are several occurrences that really surprised me. A perfect example is the following innocent statements:
byte b = -1;
char c = (char)b;
so c=-1, right? Wrong. Places like this are things that you could potentially knock your head against the wall trying to figure out why something doesn't do what it appears to do.
(In this case, byte is signed, char isn't, and the widening cast fills in bits, leaving c=65535.)
A good job is also done describing best-practices for API and library designers, as well as us, the more mundane programmers.
The only downside (from my background and point of view - that of an applications architect, and not generally as a language or API designer) - is that some of the amazing optical illustrations can cause dizziness and nausea - although I can't guarantee that won't happen by the loops and twists that your mind will be tied into because of the puzzles.
Lastly, Bloch & Gafter include an appendix that serves as a summary to all the pitfalls and traps that are introduced in the book, and almost could be an appendix to Bloch's 'Effective Java'.
The bottom line is that in reading this book I learned a fair amount about several edge cases and issues that I had actually encountered - and it increased my understanding as to HOW java does things - although I'm fairly certain that I'll never understand the WHY. And most of all - I enjoyed this book, from start to finish, and that's rare, and worth the time.
You can purchase Java Puzzlers from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Java Puzzlers is none of the above(*), being well written, amusing, whimsical, and above all, informative. Bloch and Gafter have brought us a book that entertains us with corner-cases, one-in-a-million chances and other happenings that explore the ins, outs, and guts of the Java Programming Language.
Anyone who has been a serious java programmer in the last several years should know the name Josh Bloch, and more importantly, should have read his book Effective Java. Josh, acting as java's platform architect has been directing and guiding Java into it's current incarnation as a mature, robust (Cue the laughter from the peanut gallery) programming language.
This book primarily references the Java 1.5 programming language, and some of the puzzles are 1.5-specific, although a significant portion of the problems are applicable to previous versions. Also, this book is aimed towards people who are competent-to-expert java programmers, and although there is a lot of good information, people who are new to Java will probably be a bit lost. As it stands, I have 7 years of Java experience, and I was only able to figure out about 15% of the puzzles without resorting to code, or more frequently the answer. The reason that I didn't stop to try out most of these problems is that the book is eminently readable, and difficult to put down (unusual for a computer book, and doubly so for one that delves deeply into a language specification document.)
This book dives into a lot of esoteric bits of the Java Language Specification, also known as "The Big Paper That Sometimes Tells Us Why Java Acts Like That," and there are lots of bits in there that don't even make sense, let alone seem intuitive.
Divided into 10 parts, each part presents a series of different code problems that usually present a small method or class that looks innocuous, but in reality exposes a piece of behavior that is strange, spectacular, or, more often, completely confusing. The book exposes flaws in the language, including one of my personal pet peeves, their inability to have a consistent Date object, and this is noted in Puzzle 62 by my favorite line in the book: "The lesson for API designers is: If you can't get it right the first time, at least get it right the second..."
One topic that I found was a continually recurring theme had to do with handling primitives and what happens when they are cast into different types. Java provides a lot of ways to deal with primitives, and for the most part, they play nicely with each other. There are several occurrences that really surprised me. A perfect example is the following innocent statements:
byte b = -1;
char c = (char)b;
so c=-1, right? Wrong. Places like this are things that you could potentially knock your head against the wall trying to figure out why something doesn't do what it appears to do.
(In this case, byte is signed, char isn't, and the widening cast fills in bits, leaving c=65535.)
A good job is also done describing best-practices for API and library designers, as well as us, the more mundane programmers.
The only downside (from my background and point of view - that of an applications architect, and not generally as a language or API designer) - is that some of the amazing optical illustrations can cause dizziness and nausea - although I can't guarantee that won't happen by the loops and twists that your mind will be tied into because of the puzzles.
Lastly, Bloch & Gafter include an appendix that serves as a summary to all the pitfalls and traps that are introduced in the book, and almost could be an appendix to Bloch's 'Effective Java'.
The bottom line is that in reading this book I learned a fair amount about several edge cases and issues that I had actually encountered - and it increased my understanding as to HOW java does things - although I'm fairly certain that I'll never understand the WHY. And most of all - I enjoyed this book, from start to finish, and that's rare, and worth the time.
You can purchase Java Puzzlers from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
When you have spare time and decide to do something with a book (That's like an analog webpage, for the neuronauts among us), how often do you turn to a computer related book? How often has it happened in the last year? Right. The problem being that computer books are often either: a) boring, b) difficult to read, c) poorly written, or possibly: d) made of cheese
Being a computer science grad student... I imagine myself to be among the nerdy. Interestingly, I own an assortment of books, spend most of my time that isn't in a lab in a library, and read about 6-7 hard-copy academic papers a week, in addition to an assortment of books. When I have free time, I read books on AI.