Rating: 
Summary: Best technical book I've read in years.
Review: I've spent the last few weeks reading one or two of Joshua Bloch's maxims a day, and letting the information settle in over the course of 24 hours. I've alternated between wholehearted agreement with a point, to embarrassment regarding recent and/or repeated violations of one of his excellent rules.I've been a programmer for 20 years, and a Java programmer for the last 7 years, and I learned a lot from this book. I recommend it highly.
Rating:
Summary: worth every penny
Review: I don't buy a lot of technical books anymore because I can usually find what I need online. But this book is a must-read for experienced java programmers. It clarified a lot of fuzzy general notions in my head of the best ways of doing certain things (for example, in practice, inheiritance usually stinks vs. composition). I also picked up several powerful new ways of doing things (typesafe enum is awesome!). Plus, when trying to figure out how to code something in teams, it's great to have books like this around..."let's see what Josh Bloch says, after all he wrote the Collections framework and has this book that everyone loves" (people do the same with Design Patterns, for example).
Rating:
Summary: Best Advanced Java Book Out There - Bar None!
Review: The most useful C++ book I have ever read is "Effective C++" by Scott Meyers, and that was over five years ago. "Effective Java" is very similar in format to "Effective C++" and is now my favorite Java book. I read the book about six months ago, and I'm now reading it once again, cover to cover. If you're an experienced Java programmer, there is no other book out there that I know of that will improve your Java coding skills as much as this one! Buy the book now and keep it handy at all times.
Rating: 
Summary: Just some programming tricks!!
Review: I bought this book online and didn't check it out in the bookstore first. I almost read the entire book(because I don't want to waste my money. Otherwise, I won't even dare to write a review for this book) This book is just about a bunch of little programming tricks that may not even help you on the projects. Little bit from here and little bit from there. No match with Efficitive C++. The author just borrowed the name. Anyway, you just need to go to the bookstore and read the items you need. Please, save your money to buy other books.
Rating: 
Summary: Lots of great nuggets
Review: Josh Bloch gives great insight into best practices that really can only be discovered after years of study and experience. The idea being that you won't make the same mistakes that he and others made during their tenure designing the Java APIs.
Rating:
Summary: Must read
Review: This is a superb book, it clearly covers many of the
language/platform subtlties & trickery you need to
learn to become a real Java master. I hope to have everyone I work on a project
from now on read the book to for shared a solid
foundation of good-coding practices.
Rating:
Summary: Like buying a couple years of experience
Review: Bloch apparently has ties to Gosling the creator of Java which explains his depth of knowledge of this Language. We all develop many practices with different languages that experience teaches us is the thing to do but we never found these practices in books (or seldom). This entire book is "this is how you should do this" or "This is the language you don't read about in the books". Very good stuff.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, succinct and highly professional
Review: IMHO, The Java Bible is out. It is that simple. I think this book deserves no
less popularity and respect than "Effective C++" which set the high standard
to the "Effective" series. It's definitely not a beginners book, this is the book that core Java developers
should memorize by heart. This book is written by the Sun expert who both
design and develop Java run-time libraries (Collections, in particular, which is
one of the prettiest species in Java) and is definitely aware of their successes
and failures. Out of his experience Joshua brings hundreds of "how about this"
unexpectable situations - those I doubt you was ever thinking of before. It contains 57 issues covering topics about:
- creating objects (how about static factories vs constructors ?)
- methods common to all objects (ever thought that overriding clone, equals, hashCode
and toString is easy ?),
- designing interfaces of your classes and interfaces (ever realized how immutability
is important ? ever wondered which one of the inner classes fits best ?)
- substitutes to C constructs (don't say there are no unions and enums in Java)
- general programming and methods (ever knew that overloading is dangerous in
it's nature and that ( 1.00 - ( 9 * 0.1 )) != 0.1 ?)
- exceptions (ever wondered how should you react to some particular failure -
terminate the JVM, throw the exception [which one ?], return null ?)
- threads (ever thought that double check locking is broken and that notify() is
more dangerous than notifyAll() anh what are 'alien' methods that cause deadlocks ?)
- serialization (making your object serializable should never be just declaring
it this way ! How about readResolve() and defensive readObject() ?) Amazingly - this book contains tons of essential information but Joshua's
succinct style simple put it into 230 pages and 57 items. I don't think there's
any sentence or chapter you may ignore - every word author says worths remembering
very good and very carefully. I read it once but I'm definitely going to re-read
it once in a while. If you need other proofs - just believe me that most of the Java articles on
JavaWorld and JDC reference this book in that or another way. If James Gosling is
saying "Some might think that I don't need any Java books, but I need this one",
doesn't it mean that you and me definitely need it too ?
I wish I could give it 6 starts, really. Happy reading !
Rating:
Summary: You must read this one!
Review: Many other reviewers of this book wrote insightful reviews already so I will not repeat that. I just want to say, I never thought a technical book would be so fun, exciting and enjoyable until read this one. You'll get experts' experience and advice by reading this book, and you will not be bored. GO GET THIS BOOK!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent and thought provoking.
Review: The first time I noticed Josh Bloch was when I was reading an article on artima.com. His incisive comments on software design and coding style led me to read this book. It is undoubtedly the best Java book I've read since "Thinking In Java". I highly recommend this book to anyone who's written enough Java to have asked themselves, "is this the right way to do what I'm doing," or "there must be a better way." Anyone who is designing libraries should study Josh's Items, challenge them. There is much to appreciate in the volume of experience that writing a book like this takes. The one weakness in this book: it does not address the kind of software development consulting teams need to adopt in order to deliver "Extreme Programming" style. I wish it addressed programming for customization; the book squarely focusses on programming reusable libraries. I hope every reader derives as much wisdom from this book as I was able to. Thank you Josh Bloch.
| 
