Book Review: Better Faster Lighter Java

This book is more of a philosophy book than a how to. The first half deals with these main principles:

• Keep it simple
• Do one thing and do it well
• Strive for transparency
• You are what you eat
• Allow for extension

The remainder of the book deals with Hibernate and Spring and provides a practical example of how to apply the above principles. At times the author vents about current J2EE practices but on the whole I found it to be a very worthwhile read. In particular I like the way that the main principles are reinforced during each example.
If you liked The Pragmatic Programmer you should like Better Faster Lighter Java.

Where to start?

With so many cool technologies where do you start to get the best learning experience? Spring, Hibernate, Maven, Griffon, Grails where's the best bang for my time? As I work in J2EE I want to try and understand things that will be job relevant but the projects I'm looking at aren't enterprise in nature.

I guess that the way that I learn best is to do. I have a heap of ideas for projects which will allow me to try bits and pieces of particular languages and frameworks. I really want to avoid yak shaving where possible but I suppose even this adds to the learning process.

Stay tuned and I'll make a decision about which project to start on first.

Welcome

I recently read an article where somebody wondered where they could get the experience that would enable their programming career to take off. They were widely panned in the forum by other users but I thought it was a perfectly reasonable question. I remember thinking the same thing when in the final stages of Uni, "everybody wants people with experience but nobody is willing to give you a chance to get experience".

Inspite of this, I have been lucky and landed on my feet in the perfect job where I get paid to do what I love and work with some awesome people. I relayed my thoughts to a colleague (who I shall refer to as Grandmaster G) who said that when hiring its easier look at people have 1) contributed to open source software and 2) have a blog that he could read to learn more about them.

While I'm not looking to work anywhere else I thought it would be good to share some of my experiences as I learn more about the art of programming. I intend to keep it up to date with my development experiences and hopefully others will find it interesting as well.