Core Java SE 9 for the Impatient, 2nd Edition - Cay Horstmann

Core Java SE 9 for the Impatient by Cay Horstmann is a succinct yet comprehensive guide to the Java SE 9 language. Explanations are clearly laid out with unambiguous language and diagrams. While this book is presented as a Java SE 9 title, the content covers the Java language in general and for the most part does not discuss SE 9 specific features in isolation rather simply including them in the whole. This makes for a consistent delivery that focusses on making good use of the language rather than on what's new and what's not.

For readers who would not be that experienced with Java, but have some familiarity with programming, each chapter presents a thorough and easy to follow exploration of the language features, and I especially like that Cay tackles the basics of how to operate the 'java' and 'javac' commands on the command line without muddying the waters with IDE "magic". That said, there is plenty of meat here too for the seasoned developer, such as myself, and a lot can be learned from Cay's opinions alone. All the code examples used are available as a download and each chapter is concluded with a set of exercises for the reader to put the theory into practice, although it would have been nice to see solutions to those exercises.

A broad range of topics are covered throughout this book and I get the sense that they are carefully curated to cover what I would consider everything you need for solid general purpose programming. Edge case, quirky, and specialist topics are largely omitted but when mentioned, as with the Reflection library, are introduced with a note of well deserved caution. This recurring theme of Cay sharing his experience based opinion about the features and usage of the Java language is what I believe sets this title apart from other similar titles.

I give this book 10 out of 10 horseshoes.

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Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.

It is a nice book, but I wish it had more end of chapter problems of different types. Perhaps these problems could be included as a supplementary book. As an aside, it would be nice to have suggestions for some non-trivial projects also.

One major problem I faced in learning Lambdas and Streams from this book is that there were not enough exercises to make me remember the concepts. After all, the more you practice, the better and longer you remember. I was forced to find questions in stack overflow and solve them. I lost a lot of time in filtering out bad or silly questions to get a little bit of practice.

Sometimes, I cannot practice streams for many days which makes me fear that I'll forget what I learned. I'd imagine that any experienced OO programmer who is learning Java from this book could benefit from extra exercises.

Please consider making a supplement with extra problems, and hints or solutions.

Thanks !

PS -  2 years late. But, I hope Cay reads this.

I"ve seen many unpleasant reviews and comments about this book
now I see it worth my time to spend on it