Rating: 
Summary: Terrific Strategies
Review: A real eye opener! I am more conscious of my programming style after reading this book. It has taught me to look for potential stumbling blocks esp. regarding performance.
Rating: 
Summary: Buy it if you're a Swing developer
Review: Although this is a nice-to-have book (for bookworms like us which isn't after all?), I wouldn't really recommend it as the book to buy for Java performance any more, other than for people that are doing Swing, for whom it would indeed be greatly beneficial. Jack Shirazi's "Java Performance Tuning" is becoming the de facto standard Java performance book, and a second edition of it has come out, which is pretty up-to-date. On the other hand, Wilson's book is starting to show its age.
Wilson (the main author) has worked on Sun's Swing team and then on the performance team in the late 90's and that is where he draws his experience from. This book is not geared toward people that do server-side Java (which I believe to be the great majority).
Rating:
Summary: Buy it if you're a Swing developer
Review: Although this is a nice-to-have book (for bookworms like us which isn't after all?), I wouldn't really recommend it as the book to buy for Java performance any more, other than for people that are doing Swing, for whom it would indeed be greatly beneficial. Jack Shirazi's "Java Performance Tuning" is becoming the de facto standard Java performance book, and a second edition of it has come out, which is pretty up-to-date. On the other hand, Wilson's book is starting to show its age.
Wilson (the main author) has worked on Sun's Swing team and then on the performance team in the late 90's and that is where he draws his experience from. This book is not geared toward people that do server-side Java (which I believe to be the great majority).
Rating: 
Summary: Great start, straight to the point
Review: Although this topic could be explored a lot deeper, this is a great book to get started on Java performance. I read it, cover to cover, in a few days on the bus, back and forth to work, and it's changed my approach to coding in Java. The first part on strategies is fundamental and cover concepts on performance. This is a must for anybody who wants to get started on the topic. The second part on tactics goes into details about spesific issues in Java, and because of the GUI / Swing background of the authors, it is mostly focused on topics related to that. If that's what you're working on, this is a 5 star book, but since Java is becoming more and more server focused technology, it's a little bit missing for people like myself who write Servlets and JSPs. Hopefully, there'll soon be a book that discusses performance in J2EE.
Rating:
Summary: Great for Java APPLICATION developers
Review: For some reason Java has fragmented into two camps. Web, application server, EJB folks and Java application folks. The needs of the two are very different and as a developer tasked with writing robust Java applications this book is a great resource. The writer is NOT a English major writing about a technical subject but a seasonsed developer sharing solid information that I have not found anyhwere else. Ironically the only other book of value on the topic of Java application performance is geared more towards writing a HTTP server. (server side) But it is an excellant companion to this book as well. [Dov Bulka's book] A point worth mentioning is... This book is NOT for learning Java. It is for people who have read and studied everything else and still have questions about writing a great Java application that runs on all platforms and has a great UI. I would highly recommend this book to a Senior Java developer ESPECIALLY if your getting kicked from the C++ boys about your application being too slow.
Rating: 
Summary: I hope you find this book useful
Review: I am the lead author on this book. I've been working at Sun's Java Software for over three years now (in various jobs). For much of that time my job has focused solely on improving performance. Most of my time is spent working with the developers creating the internals of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to improve performance. However, a significant fraction of my time is spent working with developers who have hard to solve performance problems. I (and my co-author Jeff) have learned a tremendous amount about tuning software for the Java Platform based on these two activities. This book is an attempt to distill and share some of that information.When we started writing this book I envisioned a "cook book" of handy tricks to improve performance. However, when we really started to map out the issues we discovered that most of the tough problems in performance were structural. They involved tough design decisions, or the use of performance analysis tools. This is a field where there are often not easy answers. This led us to use the "Strategies and Tactics" approach. The first part of the book concentrates on high-level concepts, while the second part gets into the guts of various areas of the platform. This book isn't an encyclopedia of performance tuning techniques. There are certainly useful techniques we didn't cover. However, to achieve focus in the book, we really concentrated on things we'd seen work in real production systems. This includes our own work tuning the JRE internals, as well lessons we learned working with real developers trying to deploy solutions to their customers. We wanted to avoid the feeling that this was an academic text. One final thing I'd like to mention is the section on Garbage Collection. GC is a very misunderstood area of the Java Platform and it is highly critical to performance (both on the client and server). The way GC works has been something of a mystery to many developers. I'm hopeful that the section on GC will clear up the issues for a lot of developers reading this book. If you have questions or comments about the book you can contact Jeff and I at <jpp-book@eng.sun.com>. Happy Tuning, -Steve
Rating: 
Summary: Leaves so much un-answered
Review: I was really disappointed with this book. Its great for high level concepts but if you just want to know why to use StringBuffers rather than Strings for complex operations then this book isn't it. It covers topics such as class loading but mostly ignores common coding techniques which can have more efficient alternatives. The fact that it has a whole section on JNI perfromance sort of says it all. As the book is so thin anyway, it could really do with being thickened up with a lot more examples. I may glance it it occasionally but I really wish I hadn't bought it at all.
Rating:
Summary: Leaves so much un-answered
Review: I was really disappointed with this book. Its great for high level concepts but if you just want to know why to use StringBuffers rather than Strings for complex operations then this book isn't it. It covers topics such as class loading but mostly ignores common coding techniques which can have more efficient alternatives. The fact that it has a whole section on JNI perfromance sort of says it all. As the book is so thin anyway, it could really do with being thickened up with a lot more examples. I may glance it it occasionally but I really wish I hadn't bought it at all.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book but should have been more detailed
Review: I would definitely reccomend this book to someone who is not at all familiar with performance tactics in Java, but this book does not adds much to the much known tactics found on web or in the Dov Bulka's book. Since this book was from Sun Press I definitely expected more from this book considering the depth provided by other books from them. But this book kinda embarrased me by reiterating the tricks already known and introducing the esoteric concept of benchmarking and not providing much details with it. I hope somebody would come up with more exhaustive work in this field very soon....
Rating:
Summary: Not very helpful for experienced java developers
Review: I would definitely reccomend this book to someone who is not at all familiar with performance tactics in Java, but this book does not adds much to the much known tactics/tips/tricks used in everyday programming or found on web. Since this book was from Sun Press I definitely expected more from this book considering the depth provided by other books from them. But this book embarrased me by reiterating the tricks already known and introducing the esoteric concept of benchmarking and not providing much details with it. Being a java developer since last 5 years, I didn't learn anything new from this book except the concept of benchmarking which this book brushes lightly without really explaining it well.
Sincere advice: Don't spend your money on this one.
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