Warning: preg_match() [
function.preg-match]: Compilation failed: invalid range in character class at offset 4 in
/var/www/mortendahl.dk/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/lightbox-plus/classes/shd.class.php on line
1384
Warning: preg_match_all() [
function.preg-match-all]: Compilation failed: invalid range in character class at offset 4 in
/var/www/mortendahl.dk/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/lightbox-plus/classes/shd.class.php on line
700
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in
/var/www/mortendahl.dk/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/lightbox-plus/classes/shd.class.php on line
707
Warning: preg_match_all() [
function.preg-match-all]: Compilation failed: invalid range in character class at offset 4 in
/var/www/mortendahl.dk/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/lightbox-plus/classes/shd.class.php on line
700
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in
/var/www/mortendahl.dk/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/lightbox-plus/classes/shd.class.php on line
707
It’s always a bit embarrassing to acknowledge, but Java Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases is one of the books on my bookshelf that has remained largely unread for quite a while (since 2006 in fact; I have a habit of writing the acquisition date inside the cover). Yet this week I finally finished it, and for a book on programming languages it’s actually a pretty good read. Here’s a few off the top of my head reasons.
Most importantly of course is that it’s educational. While a few of the puzzles are indeed corner cases that I suspect most will only rarely if ever encounter (such as the weird behaviour that may arise in floating point arithmetic), most of the material seems likely to come in handy from time to time when a bug creeps in. And not only for the simple bug: on a few occasions were the bugs I found in the puzzles not really bugs at all, with the real problem being something a lot more profound.
Fortunately, while the depth of the material sometimes makes the puzzle format of the book seem a bit quaint (for instance when the bug lies deep in the Java framework), the book also contains an elaborate overview/index in the back so that it’s also useful for those of us without photographic memory.
Which brings me to the final point, namely that the presentation is also quite pleasant: the font is easy to read, the writing is concise, and — most importantly — the code snippets are nicely formatted, to the point, and without clutter (to see how much impact this can have just open the horrible Thinking in Java). Due to the puzzle/solution nature of the book some blank space had to occur, but even this is nicely filled, with visual illusions.