Content area
Java is a programming language. It is also a tool, and a tool in the wrong hands is useless, sometimes even dangerous. Knowing only the syntax and semantics of Java does not a programmer make. A programmer must also know and understand intimately the environmental paradigm, which in Java's case, is object-oriented design. It is not enough to understand what an object is, what an interface is, how objects implement interfaces, ad nauseam. A programmer needs to know the mystic ways in which those rules and relationships can be combined into flexible, reusable, and scalable systems. The books that I discuss here will give you those lessons and enhance your career as a Java developer. Ironically, none of them contain the word Java in their titles.
To paraphrase the book Design Patterns by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides, and Grady Boocha (Addison- Wesley, 1995), a pattern describes a recurring problem and proposes a reusable solution. Patterns simplify your job by helping you avoid the pitfalls of memory limitations via object sharing -- with Flyweight, for example -- or create a swapable integration with third- party libraries such as Facade. Design Patterns details those two patterns, plus a score more, and provides code examples and easy-to- understand diagrams. Although the code samples are all in C++, the syntax sufficiently resembles Java; most programmers will thus have no problem grasping the concepts. There is an imitation of this book available that uses Java for the examples -- Java Design Patterns: A Tutorial by James William Cooper (Addison-Wesley, 2000) -- but you won't find the same clarity and depth that the Gang of Four (the authors' established nickname) conveys in Design Patterns.
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (Addison- Wesley Object Technology Series) by Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, and Don Roberts (Addison-Wesley, 1999) offers developers various options to starting over. Refactoring is the process of improving performance by reorganizing a program's internal structure without altering external behavior. Refactoring could make a method run faster or provide more accurate results without changing the method's signature. The changes are invisible to the programs that call the method, so no code requires modification.