ISBN:0201709694Amazon.com
Now that Java is doing more and more in the field, improving its speed and efficiency is crucial for many working developers. Written by two Sun insiders, Java Platform Performance gives the experienced Java programmer plenty of useful strategies and tips for getting the most out of Java code.
This concise book offers plenty of concrete suggestions for improving real-world programs, but it also helps you think about performance as you design and test Java software. The authors first look at what "performance" really means. Beyond raw computational speed, this term can mean reducing RAM footprint, creating more responsive interfaces, and adding better scalability to programs so that they can handle more users and data.
A strength of this title is that the authors share their expertise, garnered from optimizing the Swing classes for Sun. (The tips for creating custom models and renderers in Swing will help your tables and other controls work with large datasets efficiently.) This text shows you how to benchmark and profile Java code and where to look for problem hot spots--and, once these are solved, where to go next for even better performance. You learn how to reduce object creation and class loading, which can allow your programs to load faster and consume less memory.
Also notable here is a solution for letting multiple Java programs share a single JVM for reduced memory overhead. The authors do a good job of dismantling the notion that using the Java Native Interface (JNI) is a quick fix for better performance. (The benchmarked code suggests that in almost every case native code is likely to be slower.) They also show how memory leaks still can exist in Java, and how to find them. The book closes with a guide to Java garbage collection and the latest on Sun's HotSpot Virtual Machine.
If anything, this book will convince you that good performance in Java isn't accidental; it takes planning, expertise, and plenty of testing. Also, it will get you thinking about performance in new ways with excellent strategies and tips that can help you write faster and more efficient Java code. --Richard Dragan
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Reviews From AMAZON.COM
Buy it if you're a Swing developer
Although this is a nice-to-have book (for bookworms like us which isn't after all?), I wouldn't really recommend it as the book to buy for Java performance any more, other than for people that are doing Swing, for whom it would indeed be greatly beneficial. Jack Shirazi's "Java Performance Tuning" is becoming the de facto standard Java performance book, and a second edition of it has come out, which is pretty up-to-date. On the other hand, Wilson's book is starting to show its age.
Wilson (the main author) has worked on Sun's Swing team and then on the performance team in the late 90's and that is where he draws his experience from. This book is not geared toward people that do server-side Java (which I believe to be the great majority).
Not very helpful for experienced java developers
I would definitely reccomend this book to someone who is not at all familiar with performance tactics in Java, but this book does not adds much to the much known tactics/tips/tricks used in everyday programming or found on web.
Since this book was from Sun Press I definitely expected more from this book considering the depth provided by other books from them. But this book embarrased me by reiterating the tricks already known and introducing the esoteric concept of benchmarking and not providing much details with it.
Being a java developer since last 5 years, I didn't learn anything new from this book except the concept of benchmarking which this book brushes lightly without really explaining it well.
Sincere advice: Don't spend your money on this one.