I recently got my hands (my kindle) on the book: Getting Started with Google Guava by Bill Bejeck.

I love reading technical books and always hope to learn new stuff. As an extensive user of the Guava library, I was really intrigued to see what I was missing from this library and how I could improve the usage of it.

I will not go over it chapter by chapter with explanations, as anyone can check the TOC and see the details of what this book covers. Instead, I will try to give my own impression.

The book covers all aspects of the Guava library. For each aspect, the author shows the most used implementation and mentions other ones.

In nearly every chapter, I was introduced to some gems that immediately went into our own codebase when I started refactoring. That was FUN. And I saw code improvements instantly.

I really enjoyed reading the code examples with the extensive usage of JUnit as showcases for the behavior of the various classes. It’s a great way of showing what the library does. And as a side effect, it shows developers how a test is used as the specs of the code.

It seems that the author was very meticulous in writing clean and testable code. Two areas, which I think are, well, the most important for being a professional developer (a craftsman).

I think that this book is great for both newbies and experienced Guava users.
I think it is also great for developers who want to have some kind of knowledge on how to write clean and better code.