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(37 reviews)
Author: Joshua Bloch
ISBN : 032133678X
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Format: PDF, EPUB
You can download Free Java? Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases [Paperback] for everyone book 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link
"Every programming language has its quirks. This lively book reveals oddities of the Java programming language through entertaining and thought-provoking programming puzzles."
--Guy Steele, Sun Fellow and coauthor of The Java™ Language Specification
"I laughed, I cried, I threw up (my hands in admiration)."
--Tim Peierls, president, Prior Artisans LLC, and member of the JSR 166 Expert Group
How well do you really know Java? Are you a code sleuth? Have you ever spent days chasing a bug caused by a trap or pitfall in Java or its libraries? Do you like brainteasers? Then this is the book for you!
In the tradition of Effective Java™, Bloch and Gafter dive deep into the subtleties of the Java programming language and its core libraries. Illustrated with visually stunning optical illusions, Java™ Puzzlers features 95 diabolical puzzles that educate and entertain. Anyone with a working knowledge of Java will understand the puzzles, but even the most seasoned veteran will find them challenging.
Most of the puzzles take the form of a short program whose behavior isn't what it seems. Can you figure out what it does? Puzzles are grouped loosely according to the features they use, and detailed solutions follow each puzzle. The solutions go well beyond a simple explanation of the program's behavior--they show you how to avoid the underlying traps and pitfalls for good. A handy catalog of traps and pitfalls at the back of the book provides a concise taxonomy for future reference.
Solve these puzzles and you'll never again fall prey to the counterintuitive or obscure behaviors that can fool even the most experienced programmers.
Books with free ebook downloads available Free Java? Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases
- Paperback: 312 pages
- Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (July 4, 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 032133678X
- ISBN-13: 978-0321336781
- Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 7.5 x 9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Free Java? Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases
My wife popped this book open after dinner. Big mistake -- we had planned to spend the night watching Firefly on DVD. She read the first puzzle. We went to the blackboard (yes, we're so geeky and our NY apartment's so small that there's a blackboard in the dining nook). Between us, we had half a dozen possible answers about what a three-line program was going to do. We found at least four boundary conditions and were pretty sure about two of them. For the record, the first puzzle she opened to involved the compound XOR assignment statement x^=y^=x^=y. They're not all that bit-fiddly; some of the other puzzles include class and method mazes, integer or double arithmetic oddities, unexpected exception/initialization interactions, string/charset twistiness, etc.
I thought I'd be good at this kind of puzzle. As an academic, I wrote about programming languages. I read Bloch's "Effective Java" book. Twice. I follow its advice religously and make my coworkers read it. I've read most of the source code for String, StringBuffer and the collections framework and I/O streams. I just came off a week-long coding project where I did exclusively bit-level I/O with all the shifts and masks you could ask for. I was wrong. I got about 1/5 of the puzzles right if I give myself partial credit for diagnosing the boundary condition in the question and having the right answer be in my top two or three guesses.
Unless you've written the bit fiddling parts of a JVM implementation, or are the kind of person who can remember minute details of the specification, you'll most likely suffer. And love it. Then you can relate the puzzles at gatherings of geeks and look on with a smug grin as they twist in the wind. These would be perfect interview questions for a sadistic HR person.
This book is filled with brainteasers about the Java programming language and its core libraries. Anyone with a working knowledge of Java can understand these puzzles, but many of them are tough enough to challenge even the most experienced programmer. Puzzlers are grouped according to the features they use, but you cannot assume that the trick to a puzzle is related to its chapter heading.
Most of the puzzles exploit counterintuitive or obscure behaviors that can lead to bugs. Every platform has them, but Java has far fewer than other platforms of comparable power. The goal of the book is to entertain the reader with puzzles while teaching you to avoid the underlying traps and pitfalls. By working through the puzzles, you become less likely to fall prey to these dangers in your own code and more likely to spot them the code of others over which you have maintenance priveleges.
This book is meant to be read while you have access to a computer that has a Java development environment installed, ideally JDK 5.0, which is the latest release at the time I am writing this. That is because some of the puzzles rely on pitfalls in this particular release of Java.
Most of the puzzles take the form of a short program that appears to do one thing but actually does something else. It's the reader's job to figure out what each program does. It would be best if you first study the program/puzzle and determine what you think it will do. Next, run the program and see if its expected behavior matches its actual behavior. Try to fix the program if you believe it is "broken". Finally, read the solution and see if it matches your answer. What is really great about this book is that it sticks to pitfalls in the core language and doesn't delve into any of the add-on API's or J2EE.
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