Java Cookbook by Ian Darwin: Book review

Java Cookbook by Ian F. Darwin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What you want from a programming language cookbook is instruction on the basic tasks that are needed to form the scaffolding that you build around your application. Language teaching and references can teach you syntax and good practices. Topical books can demonstrate how to tasks in the large. But the cookbook is for the small but necessary tasks. And for me, who does not spend much time in the JavaVM ecosystem, the Java Cookbook is a very welcome addition to my bookshelf.

I spend most of my time doing scientific programming in Python and R, but I am starting to return to the JVM because of the need to deploy what I develop. But while other languages like Jython, Groovy, Scala, and Clojure exist on the JVM, to use them well means you need grounding in Java, certainly most of the instructional material assumes more than passing understanding of the JVM and the Java standard library.

I've been building a prototype application using Java as my means of re-learning Java. Where this cookbook has helped me already is in understanding better how to configure projects, more effective use of the Java data structures and I/O, and some utilities. While I know what I need to do through my experiences in other languages, and Java tutorials and references can identify the libraries and functions that I need, the Java Cookbook provides well written examples that I can use to guide me through the JVM.

There are some warts. This book (like most JVM books) seems to be written with the understanding that the readers are web programmers and I think that the discussion of the options available are filtered with that in mind. But this is a very good reference for those times when you know what you need to do, and it is not the type of thing that gets put into a tutorial.

Disclaimer: I received a free electronic copy of this book through the OReilly Blogger program

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