Java Performance Tuning (2nd Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Quite Comprehensive
Review: This review is for the second addition. I have attended performance workshops and I have never found a resource as complete and thorough as this book. It is an indispensable guide to any developer looking to make their code more efficient. It goes without saying that it is probably intended for the intermediate to advanced programmer. The book is by no means superficial. Its coverage is deep and to the point. What I found useful were the number of performance metrics under various JVMs using different programmatic methods/classes. This book is more like a reference and I don't advise you read through it from front to back. The amount of information is overwhelming. My suggestion is to pick a topic that is of issue and read about it. I saw a previous review that blasted the book for having only one page for JDBC and database issues. This must be from the first edition (I only read the 2nd) because the second edition has a whole chapter (some 45 pages worth) on JDBC. Another criticism I saw was that the book lacked design patterns, it refers to. While this is often true, I don't believe this book attempts to teach you design patterns. There are whole books on this topic. I suggest you read Core J2EE design patterns if you want to know what they look like. Like I said, this book is for the intermediate to advanced programmer and it does not attempt to hash out design patterns.

Rating:
Summary: Well wicked book
Review: This superb little book is full of little tricks from an obviously experienced Java programmer. The few minor errors that I have found in it do not detract from the overall quality of the work. I have found it most useful.

Rating:
Summary: NICE BOOK! IT EXPLORED EXTRA TERRITORIES.
Review: This updated edition of "Java Performance Tuning" shows remarkable improvement over its predecessor. In addition to improving its Java 1.4 details, this book journeyed into extra territories in its bid to leave nothing to speculation. Its users would appreciate the additional information it presented on JavaServer Pages, Servlets, Enterprise JavaBeans, Java Database Connectivity, and Java NIO.
Although it provided detailed tuition on how to utilize various profiling tools in analyzing a program's characters, the main aim of this book is to furnish programmers (or developers) with all the information they would need when adopting tuning options.
It ramified every factor which affects Java performance, and would serve as a handy reminder for both developers and administrators alike. I recommended it with all pleasure!

Rating:
Summary: Totally worthwhile.
Review: We used about a dozen of the techniques from the book and our component went from being a real dog to way fast enough. Given what we achieved with the basic techniques, most of the more advanced techniques are unlikely to ever be used by us, but they were interesting and might come in useful one day. The book paid for itself within a day. Definitely useful if you have or anticipate a performance problem.

Rating:
Summary: good book, but did not talk too much about memory
Review: well, I agree with the previsous thought about this books it is very useful book. but I feel it less some topic about the memory management , of course it is a trade of between memory/speed, but it will be nice to talk them together.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent coverage of a complex topic
Review: You have been working on that Java application for two weeks and it's finally ready for testing. Your window for having the web site down is ten minutes but you aren't concerned. Three hours later with the program still running, you are more than concerned. Before you panic, pick up a copy of "Java Performance Tuning". This book is geared for serious developers who need to dramatically improve performance in their applications and are willing to dig deep into the code. For example, writing your own customized Reader and byte-to-char converter can be ten times faster than using the BufferedReader class. Shirazi starts off by showing how to measure performance and identify bottlenecks, including a way to override the Object class to measure object creation. Subsequent chapters discuss key performance issues and possible solutions. Topics covered include replacing Strings with char arrays, eliminating casting and minimizing object creation, removing method calls from inside of loops, writing your own sort routines instead of using Arrays.sort(), identifying the correct Collection object, using threading to improve performance, and optimizing distributed systems to decrease network communication. As Shirazi explains, some of the methods covered may violate encapsulation or other OO techniques so they should only be used when performance has been identified as a critical problem. Besides being well written, the book is fun. I found myself trying to figure out along with the author how to improve the performance of the various examples demonstrated in the book.