Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Third Edition of Effective Java Coming Soon

With the significant changes that have been made to the Java programming language since Java 6 (for which the Second Edition of Effective Java was published), Java developers have frequently asked about a third edition of the well-known and often-cited Java book Effective Java. When the forthcoming 3rd Edition of Effective Java was announced, there was a rush to pre-order it; as of this writing, it's the #1 New Release in the Java Programming category (it's also #7 overall in Books|Computers and Technology|Programming|Languages and Tools|Java and #49 in Books|Textbooks|Computer Science|Programming Languages). According to its Amazon page and its Pearson Store page, Effective Java, Third Edition, is expected to be released in late December of this year (December 19 advertised on Pearson page and December 29 advertised on Amazon.com page).

The third edition is anticipated to have significant new and updated content given the changes to the language with Java 7, Java 8, and Java 9. The Table of Contents available on the Pearson page does not yet show the individual items in each chapter, but it does show that the third edition of Effective Java will have an entire new chapter on and called "Lambdas and Streams." This new chapter will be the seventh of twelve chapters in the book and will immediately follow the two chapters on significant features introduced in Java 5 (enums, annotations, and generics).

I imagine there will be new items and updated items in the other eleven chapters that previously existed in the first two editions as later versions of Java will impact many of those chapters. In fact, both the Pearson page and the Amazon page provide the same list of some of the "new coverage" items in this book and many of these will likely fall into one of the chapters other than the one on lambdas and streams.

I have never purchased three editions of the same book before and the ~$50 USD is not cheap, but I'll likely be purchasing the third edition of Effective Java as a Christmas gift for myself.

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