Effective Java 2nd edition - Book review

If you are even a bit serious about your java programming, this book is a must read. There is no other book that improved the quality of my java programming in such a dramatic way.

Now this was my opinion on the first edition. After having read the second edition, I can tell you that the same top quality is there, with lots and lots of big and tiny updates on top.

Ok, with that out of way, here are some comments:

• In the introduction it says 'This book is not intended to be read from cover to cover'. Ignore that, read it from cover to cover anyway!
• Initially I missed an overview of what changed since the 1st edition. But when I started reading I understood that such a list would be ridiculous. Every chapter has been improved in tiny, and sometimes big ways.

And now for some tiny counter noises:

• Item 4: This item is about enforcing noninstantiability of classes that contain static methods only. However, except for saying that is nonsensical, it fails to provide a good reason for preventing this. I would say: don't bother. Let silly programmers instantiate the class. Firstly it can not do much wrong, secondly, any good IDE warns you about it.
• Item 8: When overriding equals, one should use == instead of equals to compare fields of enum type. The item mentions that this should only be done for certain primitive fields.
• Item 60: I disagree with the advice to throw NullPointerException in case an argument was null while the contract of the method specifies that this is not allowed. NPE is also thrown by the JVM and is therefore more suitable to indicate a programming error. IllegalArgumentException is in my opinion more suited to express that a method is used wrongly. In other words: a NPE indicates an error inside the method, an IAE indicates an error outside of the method.
• Item 66: I recently saw a neater trick to control threads. More on this in the next post.
• Item 68: One thing that still puzzles me is how one can write a consumer task with the new executor services. This item does not make this clear. Perhaps this use case still warrants the creation of your own thread.

Happy reading!

Update 2008-08-03: refined my critics on throwing a NPE vs IAE.