The Well-Grounded Java Developer, Second Edition

This book has been phenomenal in aiding my mental picture of what is going on behind the scenes in a way that using the language itself never did.Every topic covered felt really well researched and presented in a way that was pleasant to read. I read this in one hour chunks before starting work and always felt myself recharged and excited to read+write code with everything new I learned now in my mental map. I think this is purely due to how well written and laid out the content is as typically textbooks are too dry and leave me exhausted from even a couple pages.One note is that the topics covered here require a functional knowledge of Java. I'd wouldn't recommend this book for somebody trying to get a job using Java or a student trying to pick the language, but for everybody else it is a fantastic read to improve the way you think about writing programs and understand what it actually looks like when its run by the JVM.

TL;DR - if you're working in the Java or JVM space, this book is for you. It covers a lot of material and strikes a good balance between providing sufficient detail and keeping the book interesting, engaging, and "reader-friendly."Whether you are hoping to dig deeper, aiming to refresh your knowledge, or wanting to learn what’s happening with Java outside of your day-to-day, this book could be a good resource. It covers important (relevant) background information about the language and the JVM, explains the why and how of language features, and dives into tooling, deployment, and performance tuning in sufficient detail to be useful without being dry or painful. The authors obviously put a lot of effort into making the plentiful code examples illustrative while keeping them concise. The topics covered are diverse while still being generally useful (at least to me). I don’t know of another Java title that includes material about performance tuning, garbage collection, JIT, and bytecode basics, containerization, Gradle and Maven, concurrency programming, functional programming, Clojure and Kotlin, and new and upcoming language features all in the same book.That said, it’s not a book about learning Java or learning how to program. It’s a book for people who use Java everyday and can benefit from understanding it in more depth and who want to be introduced to new patterns and trends.A few notes:This is a seriously comprehensive book. I would not be able to provide a review of it so soon after its publication (October 2022) if it weren't for the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP), which allowed me to read chapters of the book as it was being written. (For this reason, this review won't appear as a "Verified Purchase" - I purchased the book directly from the publisher.)Also, note that the Amazon product description details are incorrect at the time of this review. The book is 704 pages, not 74. (I have submitted the update to Amazon.)

Disclaimer, I was one of the earlier reviewers of the book, so the content might have changed slightly. In the first part, the book goes into the JVM and due to space limitations touches some interesting topics here and there, on the second, it looks into more modern use of java, like using build tools, etc, since I'm an old time this part feels a bit introductory to me. The title is ambitious, it gives some view of the land, but to properly make someone grounded the book would need to be 10x the size. I missed most the lack the frameworks and deployment/cloud runtime content, something that in 2022 is a must. The text is well written and at times, feels like a nice conversation, which it's something really nice to have. In general, interesting content that I would recommend for more Jr devs so they know something that's out there and for more Sr to find any gap, but I can't call a bible or really extensive for a dev to be really grounded in Java tech in my humble opinion.

This books covers it all - performance, concurrency, Kotlin and advanced functional programming! And it does it from a practitioner point of view. Whether you are starting out or veteran Java developer, you'll find nuggets of information in an easy to read book.

Book is easy to read, definitely helped fill some knowledge gaps for me.

I have not read the entire book, but the portion I have read has been great. It's well written and has a very smooth flow. Would definitely recommend.