Java books

[Julien Lafaye]

Hello,

I'm an experienced C and Java programmer. I'm eager to learn about Java
internals, e.g. class loading, memory management: the kind of stuff you can
program without knowing but that you should definitely masterize to write
efficient programs. Can someone recommend a book on these topics ?

I'm also interested in J2EE so if someone knows a good book about it, I
would be happy to get the reference.

Thanks,

Julien

 

[Roedy Green]

I'm eager to learn about Java
internals, e.g. class loading, memory management:

I don't think I have ever run across a book on Java Internals. There
are books on the JVM see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jvm.html
but that does not tell you much about how one goes about implementing
a JVM. I got a fair bit of background writing the BBL FORTH, which
behaves very much like the JVM.

See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/classforname.html
and http://mindprod.com/jgloss/classloader.html
to get you started on classloaders. I suspect you may need to just
sniff the web for code and figure out how it works.

Memory management in Java is duck simple from the programmer's point
of view, much simpler than C++. See
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/garbagecollection.html
for papers on how the magic is implemented.

Java gives huge latitude to the implementor, so you can't very well
write a book on how it IS done, just some of the ways it CAN BE done.

For example, though the language model puts local variables on a stack
and others on a heap, nothing constrains an implementor to actually do
it that way.

What might slake your curiosity is pouring over the source code for
the native classes in the JVM which Sun has now made open source.

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

I'm an experienced C and Java programmer. I'm eager to learn about Java
internals, e.g. class loading, memory management: the kind of stuff you can
program without knowing but that you should definitely masterize to write
efficient programs. Can someone recommend a book on these topics ?

I'm also interested in J2EE so if someone knows a good book about it, I
would be happy to get the reference.

You will need to learn about classloaders. Any good Java book especially
one that prepares for Java EE app servers should mention that.

Memory management you just leave to the JVM. Unless you want to
write your own JVM.

For efficient programs I would suggest Effective Java / Joshua Bloch
(even though the content may be different from what you will
be expecting).

There are written a ton of books about Java EE. Start with
the SUN tutorial. And then ask again more specific.

Arne