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 anarchitect 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: #27200 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-17
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 294 pages

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

Very Thorough, Maybe Too Much So
This book has very in-depth information on Java generics, but some of the details are just not that interesting to the practical developer. It helps you gain a deeper understanding, but you probably want to first know what generics are, how to use them, when to use them, and best practices for using them before you get into the nitty-gritty of how the compiler represents them in byte code and what "reification" means.

I also found it strange that symbols like T and E that are not familiar to pre Java 1.5 developers are bandied about without first telling you what they mean.

Excellent Book I wish i had it 10 yrs ago.
This is excellent book, i really wish i had this book 10 yrs ago, excellent verbiage and great concepts.

Excellent coverage of generics
The authors provide detailed examples of capabilities provided by Generics. There are plenty of examples to illustrate various concepts. And many more examples which put them all together to show how they can be used to write full fledged OOPrograms. Its admirable how a non-trivial topic like Generics has been explained in a simple and succinct style. The collections coverage is good, but not as great as the Generics coverage.