
A Reading List for JVM-based Developers - mofeeta
http://prehensiletail.com/blog/2011/11/25/a-jvm-based-developers-reading-list/
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guard-of-terra
The problem with books is that they are long (hundreds of pages each), sparse
and have very important things interleaved with trivia.

Makes me prefer to read some fiction instead. Helps personal development also.

The tech book of future would probably look like a list of narrow theses each
unwrapping into a list of smaller things and so on eventually to a long and
exhaustive explanations. Same with science papers - findings first,
explanations on demand.

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grncdr
I wrote a post-mortem for a research spike at $work yesterday with a tl;dr at
the top, the president loved it. (it's a very small company)

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petercooper
Very nice! Though academic papers have had tl;drs for a long time now, they're
called the _abstract_. (I wish technical blog posts would use them more.)

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guard-of-terra
Abstracts have two problems:

They are very short and the only way of getting a bit more details is to read
the whole article. It should zoom smoothly. For some reason authors tend to
withhold something important from the abstract. If they write what they did,
they don't tell what they got; if they tell the result, no clues on how they
figured it out.

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omaranto
I don't know about other fields, but math papers have an abstract, then a
section called "Introduction" which has some background and motivation and
ends with an overview of the rest of the paper, and then the remainder has the
details.

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jburwell
I would add that you also need to have a strong understanding of the Java
Language Specification
([http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/j3TOC....](http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/j3TOC.html)).
Recently, aomeone tried to tell me that a non-synchronized static method was
not re-entrant. These type of of fundamentals are covered by the JLS.

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mattgreenrocks
"Java: Concurrency in Practice" is a superb primer to sane, concurrent
programming in imperative languages. The first few chapters made me realize
how much I had to learn.

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ralph
I've a friend, no really -- it's not me, who would like to have the JVM spot
SSE instructions could be used. Anyone know of a JVM that steps into this
area?

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danieldk
One of the essentials is missing from this list: Bill Venner's 'Inside the
Java 2 Virtual Machine'. It is well-written and detailed.

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soc88
I had pretty much expected "Programming in Scala", considering it was called
"JVM-based" and not "Java-based" ...

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thos3000
The reason I left that off is that I was specifically trying to highlight the
runtime and performance characteristics of the JVM. These are things that
apply to any JVM-based language, but which seem to be greatly neglected by a
large number of developers. I am a Scala developer and I do quite like that
book, but it doesn't suit my purpose here.

