Product Description

This comprehensive guide shows you how to master the most important changes to Java since it was first released. Generics and the greatly expanded collection libraries have tremendously increased the power of Java 5 and Java 6. But they have also confused many developers who haven't known how to take advantage of these new features.

Java Generics and Collections covers everything from the most basic uses of generics to the strangest corner cases. It teaches you everything you need to know about the collections libraries, so you'll always know which collection is appropriate for any given task, and how to use it.

Topics covered include:

• Fundamentals of generics: type parameters and generic methods
• Other new features: boxing and unboxing, foreach loops, varargs
• Subtyping and wildcards
• Evolution not revolution: generic libraries with legacy clients and generic clients with legacy libraries
• Generics and reflection
• Design patterns for generics
• Sets, Queues, Lists, Maps, and their implementations
• Concurrent programming and thread safety with collections
• Performance implications of different collections

Generics and the new collection libraries they inspired take Java to a new level. If you want to take your software development practice to a new level, this book is essential reading.

Philip Wadler is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, where his research focuses on the design of programming languages. He is a co-designer of GJ, work that became the basis for generics in Sun's Java 5.0.

Maurice Naftalin is Technical Director at Morningside Light Ltd., a software consultancy in the United Kingdom. He has most recently served as an architect and mentor at NSB Retail Systems plc, and as the leader of the client development team of a major UK government social service system.

"A brilliant exposition of generics. By far the best book on the topic, it provides a crystal clear tutorial that starts with the basics and ends leaving the reader with a deep understanding of both the use and design of generics."
Gilad Bracha, Java Generics Lead, Sun Microsystems

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7006 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 273 pages

Review
"This is a very good book on two fairly focused topics - generics and collections. If you plan to make best use of either or both, buy a copy." - Ian Elliot, VSJ, April 2007

From the Publisher
Java Generics and Collections covers everything from the most
basic uses of generics to the strangest corner cases. It teaches you
everything you need to know about the collections libraries, so you'll
always know which collection is appropriate for any given task, and how to
use it.

About the Author
Maurice Naftalin is Technical Director at Morningside Light Ltd., a software consultancy in the United Kingdom. He has most recently served as an architect and mentor at NSB Retail Systems plc, and as the leader of the client development team of a major UK government social service system. He has taught Java since 1998 at both basic and advanced level for Learning Tree and Sun Educational Services.

Philip Wadler is professor of theoretical computer science at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, where his research focuses on functional and logic programming. He co-authored the Generic Java standard that became the basis for generics in Sun's Java 5.0 and also contributed to the XQuery language standard base. Professor Wadler received his Ph.D., in computer science from Carnegie-Mellon University and co-wrote "Introduction to Functional Programming" (Prentice-Hall).

Customer Reviews

Buy the book to gain a better understanding into a subtly complex subject
I bought this book to get a deeper understanding into how generics are implemented in Java. Beyond the basics, generics are a difficult subject to understand. The book does a good job in highlighting how Sun implemented generics in Java and the reasons for the choices that they made. The book and the subject does require existing Java programming knowledge and so cannot be considered as an introduction text. The examples although brief are to the point; I would have preferred more real life examples to be included. Apart from Angelika Langer's site on Java generics, this book is the best reference on Java generics that you will currently find.

A terrific reference
I reckon this is a great book. Generics is a difficult subject for us poor procedural programmers, and this book lays it out in a well-structured, concise but not overly dry form.

I don't like loads of wordy so-called 'real-world' examples to pad out pages. This book gets the balance exactly right.

The best book on collections I ever read
This book is about generics and collections. I must say I had difficulties in understanding all topics in the generics part (although I made mine some important concepts such as the get/put principle). But where this book really bought me in is in the collections part. The book explains with a scientific approach Java Collections, from Sets to Lists to Maps. For each, it explains the interfaces, the various implementations, the data-structures backing the various implementations, the threading support, the performance using the big-o notation. By the end of the collections part, the reader will certainly have a thourough undertanding of the various types of collection implementations, when to use them and how to put them to best use applying tradeoffs between performance, thread-safety and business requirements.