Masood Mortazavi's Blog

October 2007 Archives

Core Java. Volume 1, Fundamentals

Cay S. Horstmann and Gary Cornell's Core Java. Volume 1, Fundamentals (8th edition, revised and updated for Java SE 6) is not for the faint-hearted read. It requires some well-rewarded patience, not only because of the size of the type-face its designers have employed but also because of the quantity and quality of useful detail it provides.

I started with the section on dynamic binding which starts on page 181 and continues for the next page or so. [Yes, there is a little typo at the bottom of page 181 ("runtimeruntime") but such typos in a book of this size, with more than 800 pages of densely packed material, and that only in the first volume, should be forgivable.]

Having overlooked the small type face, the material reads almost flawlessly. All the high notes on dynamic binding are articulated in about 1.5 pages, including a discussion of the common concept of method tables and the more Java-specific method declarations that lead to static binding. Read one more page and you get an analysis of how early Java programmers used final methods to force inlining by compilers--a practice that seems to have been abandoned with the advent of just-in-time compilers, and then there is a little subtext on JIT compilers' minor shortcoming in the highly improbable cases where a subclass is loaded by a "warm" compiler.

[I know Mr. Horstmann got a bit upset with the change in placement of Java DB in early updates of Java 6, but I consider his book well-worth a read, and I might write more about it.]

Sony Ericsson P1i and Java

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