Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Effective Java Programming

Effective Java Programming, by Addison Wesley, is one of nice books i have read in software development material. and i recommend it to any developer developing in Java, starter or senior.

programming by nature is very flexible. you have many choices. it is like creating a statue using clay. You choose at every point; Class names, methods and variable names. public methods, internal implementation algorithms, structure of the package classes,.. all of those and others are left for the programmer to choose.

Effective Java programming comes to introduce a lot of the best practices for Java programmers; to enhance the stability, readability, clarity, reusability and maintainability of their code. it also has guides to the proper use of a lot of the java standard classes.

A note inside the book really draw my attention; in item 8, chapter 3, Wesley was talking about overriding the hashCode method, he stated an example of a phone number class and an implementation of a suggested hashCode, then he said "Writing such hash functions is a topic of active research and an activity best left to mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists.". Wesley encourages his readers to use the state-of-art code. that's the goal of the book.

Actually i was thinking about the classes of the open source libraries we use as i proceeded reading the book. the kind of code that shall be used by thousands of programmers all around the world.