What books should be on the bookshelf of EVERY Java programmer, no matter what specific technologies they are working on?

The two that come to my mind are

Thinking in Java
Java Concurrency in Practice

What else am I missing?

Views: 378

Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Will add one more to my list:

Effective Java
"Thinking in Java" would have been on my list. I'll have to take a look at "Effective Java".

Java Books

Beginner:

  • Head First Java, 2nd Edition
  • Thinking in Java (4th Edition)
  • Think Java
  • Introduction to Java by Sedgewick
  • Java in a Nutshell
  • Core Java Volume I--Fundamentals (9th Edition) (Core Series): Cay S. Horstmann
  • Java How To Program (late objects) by Paul Deitel, Harvey Deitel

Intermediate:

  • Effective Java (2nd Edition): Joshua Bloch
  • Java Performance: Charlie Hunt, Binu John
  • Head First Servlets and JSP
  • SCJP by Kathy and Sierra
  • Java - The Complete Reference by Herbert Schildt.
  • Java Concurrency in Practice
  • Java Performance
  • The Java Programming Language, 4th Edition

Advanced:

  • Java Puzzlers : Traps, Pitfalls, And Corner Cases

Reply to Discussion

RSS

Happy 10th year, JCertif!

Notes

Welcome to Codetown!

Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.

When you create a profile for yourself you get a personal page automatically. That's where you can be creative and do your own thing. People who want to get to know you will click on your name or picture and…
Continue

Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.

Looking for Jobs or Staff?

Check out the Codetown Jobs group.

 

Enjoy the site? Support Codetown with your donation.



InfoQ Reading List

Presentation: The Ideal Micro-Frontends Platform

Luca Mezzalira shares a decision framework for micro-frontends, covering composition, routing, and communication. He explains how to structure "stream-aligned" teams and use a "tiger team" for foundational architecture. He also discusses the sociotechnical benefits of reducing external dependencies and shares how to use guardrails and discovery services to achieve 25+ deployments per day.

By Luca Mezzalira

Agoda’s API Agent Converts Any API to MCP with Zero Code and Deployments

Agoda engineers developed API Agent, enabling a single MCP server to access any internal REST or GraphQL API with zero code and zero deployments. The system reduces overhead from multiple APIs, supports AI-assisted queries, and uses in-memory SQL post-processing for safe, scalable data handling across internal services.

By Leela Kumili

Podcast: [Video Podcast] Building Resilient Event-Driven Microservices in Financial Systems with Muzeeb Mohammad

In this episode, Thomas Betts chats with Muzeeb Mohammad about building event-driven microservices for financial systems. The discussion covers some of the core principles and patterns for event-driven architectures, reasons for using these patterns, and some of the challenges related to finance and other highly-regulated industries.

By Muzeeb Mohammad

Google Explores Scaling Principles for Multi-agent Coordination

Google Research tried to answer the question of how to design agent systems for optimal performance by running a controlled evaluation of 180 agent configurations. From this, the team derived what they call the "first quantitative scaling principles for AI agent systems", showing that multi-agent coordination does not reliably improve results and can even reduce performance.

By Sergio De Simone

Article: Architecting Agentic MLOps: A Layered Protocol Strategy with A2A and MCP

In this article, the authors outline protocols for building extensible multi-agent MLOps systems. The core architecture deliberately decouples orchestration from execution, allowing teams to incrementally add capabilities via discovery and evolve operations from static pipelines toward intelligent, adaptive coordination.

By Shashank Kapoor, Sanjay Surendranath Girija, Lakshit Arora

© 2026   Created by Michael Levin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service