Performance books put to the test; Tune up your Java programs with the help of these Java books

Summary - Want to make your users very happy? Improve the performance of your Java programs. In this article, John Zukowski puts six Java performance books to the test. Help put Java's lack-of- performance myth to rest by using one or more of these books to optimize your programs. (3,000 words)

Many people complain about the performance of their Java programs. Expecting miracles, or just giving in to hype, they want unoptimized programs to perform faster than natively C/C++-compiled code. I don't mean to say that everyone writes poorly written code, but unoptimized code is often less than perfect and can be tweaked to run faster while still being maintainable. In this article, I'll examine six Java books that explore ways to help you improve your Java programs' performance.

The six books are:

Java Platform Performance: Strategies and Tactics, Steve Wilson and Jeff Kesselman (Addison-Wesley, January 2000)

Java Performance Tuning, Jack Shirazi (O'Reilly & Associates, September 2000)

Enterprise Java Performance, Steven Halter and Steven Munroe (Prentice Hall/Sun Microsystems Press, August 2000)

Java Performance and Scalability, Volume 1: Server-Side Programming Techniques, Dov Bulka (Addison-Wesley, June 2000)

Java 2 Performance and Idiom Guide, Craig Larman and Rhett Guthrie (Prentice Hall, August 1999)

Practical Java Programming Language Guide, Peter Haggar (Addison- Wesley, February 2000)

Table 1 provides a quick look at the books' main characteristics. The first two rows should be self-explanatory. The remaining rows describe the books' coverage of improving performance in different Java technology areas.

Table 1: Performance books overview

Java Platform Performance Java

Performance Tuning Enterprise Java Performance

Java Performance and Scalability Java 2

Performance and Idiom Guide Practical Java

Price $34.95 $34.95 $49.99

$34.95 $39.99 $32.95

Total Pages 230 430 410

290 300 280

CD-ROM/Source from Web No / Yes No / Yes

No / Yes No / Yes No / No No /

Yes

Tuning Overview Good Very Good

Good Poor Average None

Coding Techniques Average Good

Poor Average Good Very Good

Object Loading Good Average None

Average Average Average

Data Structures Good Very Good

Poor Average* Average Average

Threads Poor* Very Good Poor

Good Average* Good

GUIs Good Poor None

None None None

I/O Average Good Poor

Average Average Average

Distributed Computing None Good

Very Good Very Good Poor None

JNI...