Category Archives: software

The Elephant

I am reading Hadoop, the Definite Guide, an O’Reilly book written by Tom White. The book is an excellent reference – I have the fourth edition, which is already over one year old -. It gives a short but good introduction of what MapReduce is and then it has a much longer and wonderful course on it all, it goes then into the Hadoop Distributed Filesystem, describes YARN and the I/O. There is a general chapter on Hadoop operations and then it describes briefly but sufficiently soe projects like Sqoop, Flume, Pig, Hive, Crunch, Spark and Zookeeper. Those chapters are rather short, but then you cannot cover it all in one book. The focus is right on what you need to know about Hadoop.

 

Java for all

I recently bought Der Weg zum Java-Profi, Konzepte und Techniken für die professionelle Java-Entwicklung, by Michael Inden. As you see from the title, it is a German publication. Its target audience goes from Java developers with at least some experience to experienced developers…yes, all the way to them.

The first 300+ pages offer a brush up of some basic concepts like OOD, inner interfaces and classes, I/O issues and some Java exception handling. Then you have several chapters reviewing topics such as the standard Collections, Guava, log4j and a good overview on multi-threading.
The book then gets more interesting with a bit on reflection, serialization and garbage collection tips. I found the sections on Swing and internationalization a little bit too superficial, though. Perhaps Inden might have just referred to the Oracle stuff we all can see on the Internet for those topics.

From page 795 there is a good introduction on lambda and bulk operations. JavaFX 8 is also presented in a short but decent way. Afterwards you will find chapters on bad smells, refactoring, unit tests and optimization. All in all, there is a bit for everyone. Sometimes the book might come up as superficial but I doubt there is some Java developer who cannot profit from it.JavaFX