What do you think?
Rate this book
Getting started with Google Guava
In DetailJava continues to maintain its popularity and is still one of the main languages used in the software industry today. But there are things in Java that are difficult to do that can be made easier; that’s where Guava comes in. Guava provides developers with a way to write better code, with less effort.
Getting Started with Google Guava will show the reader how to start improving their code from the very first chapter. Packed with examples and loads of source code, this book will have an immediate impact on how you work with Java.
This book starts with using Guava to help with the common tasks that Java developers perform. Then you’ll work your way through more specialized situations and finally some great functionality Guava provides that can add a lot of power to your applications with little effort. You will learn about Guava’s famous Collections classes that add unique features, like the Bi-Map, to Java’s already great Collection classes. We’ll see how to add some functional programming aspects to our code. We will also learn about using a self-loading cache for improved performance in our applications, and how to use the EventBus to create software that takes advantage of event-based programming.
ApproachThis is a short, practical guide, with lots of examples to help you learn Google Guava
Who this book is forThere is no minimum level of experience required. There is something for everyone who works with Java, from the beginner to the expert programmer.
Getting Started with Google Guava will show the reader how to start improving their code from the very first chapter. Packed with examples and loads of source code, this book will have an immediate impact on how you work with Java.
This book starts with using Guava to help with the common tasks that Java developers perform. Then you’ll work your way through more specialized situations and finally some great functionality Guava provides that can add a lot of power to your applications with little effort. You will learn about Guava’s famous Collections classes that add unique features, like the Bi-Map, to Java’s already great Collection classes. We’ll see how to add some functional programming aspects to our code. We will also learn about using a self-loading cache for improved performance in our applications, and how to use the EventBus to create software that takes advantage of event-based programming.
ApproachThis is a short, practical guide, with lots of examples to help you learn Google Guava
Who this book is forThere is no minimum level of experience required. There is something for everyone who works with Java, from the beginner to the expert programmer.
- GenresTechnical
142 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2013
9 people are currently reading
23 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 30, 2013
I had recently a chance to review this great book and I published a short review of Getting Started with Google Guava on my blog. Final thought – definitely worth reading!
At the time of writing this there is basically no literature regarding this awesome library from Google. For those of you who have never heard of Google Guava – it is a collection of Google’s core Java libraries that they use in their Java projects. This short but very informative book was written by Bill Bejeck, senior software engineer with 10 years of experience. For more information check out his blog. I would also like to give credit to my friend Petr Fiala who was kind enough to help me with this review and consulted me on some of the less known topics to me. I would also like to thank Packt Publishing for giving me access to this book.
When it comes to book itself, its, as I mentioned earlier, quite a short book. With only 142 pages this book is really easy to read in a relatively short amount of time. Author takes us on a journey through the most useful concepts and constructs in Guava in only nine chapters. This is really good news! Author expects the reader to know basic Java so he does not waste printing paper/disk space and most of all – your time, by explaining some basic Java concepts. When it comes to explaining its always to the point.
Style of writing is easily understandable and author always provides explanations to back his opinions. Gauva classes are explained in pretty straight forward manner – pure Java example followed by Gauva example with appropriate explanation. This way reader can directly see benefits from the use of Guava such as reduced amount of code, most of the time cleaner code (with exception of constructs also present in Java 7 – there is not that much of a difference, but if you were forced to use older releases of Java, you would surely appreciate provided Gauva solutions) and improved readability of code.
There are many mentions throughout the book about functionality from Guava that has been included in Java 7 release. I like this very much because it gives the reader the opportunity to decide whether to use Guava or upgrade to Java 7 and use native JDK tools. It also shows that the author keeps up with current news in Java world. By the looks of new Java 8, some of the features are strongly inspired by Guava constructs, as it happened with for example Java 7 and automatic resource management (= try-with-resources construct).
What I find especially useful about this book is the fact that it advocates the use of Guava with dependency injection frameworks like Spring or Guice. Written material as well as attached sources make use of Spring for demonstration purposes. Most of provided code comes with JUnit unit tests. This is quite a rare feature since most introductory books with similar structure and goals are usually described without any regard to these kind of frameworks so I find this to be a big plus.
Another good practice mentioned throughout this book is the use of so called fluent programming. Approach heavily used in Guava library to leverage all its power. If you have never heard of this, it is an approach that allows us developers to chain method calls together, making for a more readable code. Apart from this, author describes the use of functional programming which provides really elegant way of solving problems that would otherwise require a lot of boilerplate code. These two concepts combined with Gauva’s collections give programmers really powerful set of tools for solving everyday problems encountered in Java software development.
Where it excels
When it comes to solving everyday problems this book provides great insights on creating clean and readable code that solves these problems using Guava. It also advocates many of the best practices used in the field these days so there is a good chance that reader will pick up on these and start to use them on their own. What is really nice about this book is the fact that many chapters directly impact other chapters (based on design of Guava library) and it shows the way to orchestrate your code to leverage the most from Guava (mainly first 4 chapters). Libraries like Guava usually do not live by themselves and this book is aware of this fact and provides examples that are set in dependency injection framework (Spring). There is a set of unit tests for each chapter that provides the means to check the functionality of explained code.
Where it comes short
I have nothing criticize when it comes to the content of the book. Every chapter provides plenty of useful examples and suitable explanation and covers most important concepts from given area of Guava. The only aspect that was not entirely perfected was the formatting side of the book. Some code snippets could use better formatting and also fonts used in the book are not quite uniform. There were some issues with code samples presented in the book (like code that will not compile due to the use of multiple double quotes, doubled annotations and other). I submitted all encountered issues and based on the word from publisher these issues will be reviewed by editorial team so we might get updated version soon.
Conclusion
After reading this book I felt satisfied and also enlightened in a way. Some of the concepts explained by the book were entirely new to me and some chapters deepened my knowledge in their respected areas. When it comes to deciding whether to read this book or not I would recommend reading it. It has something for everyone and while reading it you will find yourself thinking I had to do this at one point and you will be presented with one possible way of solving given problem in quite an elegant way. To conclude this review – definitely worth reading.
At the time of writing this there is basically no literature regarding this awesome library from Google. For those of you who have never heard of Google Guava – it is a collection of Google’s core Java libraries that they use in their Java projects. This short but very informative book was written by Bill Bejeck, senior software engineer with 10 years of experience. For more information check out his blog. I would also like to give credit to my friend Petr Fiala who was kind enough to help me with this review and consulted me on some of the less known topics to me. I would also like to thank Packt Publishing for giving me access to this book.
When it comes to book itself, its, as I mentioned earlier, quite a short book. With only 142 pages this book is really easy to read in a relatively short amount of time. Author takes us on a journey through the most useful concepts and constructs in Guava in only nine chapters. This is really good news! Author expects the reader to know basic Java so he does not waste printing paper/disk space and most of all – your time, by explaining some basic Java concepts. When it comes to explaining its always to the point.
Style of writing is easily understandable and author always provides explanations to back his opinions. Gauva classes are explained in pretty straight forward manner – pure Java example followed by Gauva example with appropriate explanation. This way reader can directly see benefits from the use of Guava such as reduced amount of code, most of the time cleaner code (with exception of constructs also present in Java 7 – there is not that much of a difference, but if you were forced to use older releases of Java, you would surely appreciate provided Gauva solutions) and improved readability of code.
There are many mentions throughout the book about functionality from Guava that has been included in Java 7 release. I like this very much because it gives the reader the opportunity to decide whether to use Guava or upgrade to Java 7 and use native JDK tools. It also shows that the author keeps up with current news in Java world. By the looks of new Java 8, some of the features are strongly inspired by Guava constructs, as it happened with for example Java 7 and automatic resource management (= try-with-resources construct).
What I find especially useful about this book is the fact that it advocates the use of Guava with dependency injection frameworks like Spring or Guice. Written material as well as attached sources make use of Spring for demonstration purposes. Most of provided code comes with JUnit unit tests. This is quite a rare feature since most introductory books with similar structure and goals are usually described without any regard to these kind of frameworks so I find this to be a big plus.
Another good practice mentioned throughout this book is the use of so called fluent programming. Approach heavily used in Guava library to leverage all its power. If you have never heard of this, it is an approach that allows us developers to chain method calls together, making for a more readable code. Apart from this, author describes the use of functional programming which provides really elegant way of solving problems that would otherwise require a lot of boilerplate code. These two concepts combined with Gauva’s collections give programmers really powerful set of tools for solving everyday problems encountered in Java software development.
Where it excels
When it comes to solving everyday problems this book provides great insights on creating clean and readable code that solves these problems using Guava. It also advocates many of the best practices used in the field these days so there is a good chance that reader will pick up on these and start to use them on their own. What is really nice about this book is the fact that many chapters directly impact other chapters (based on design of Guava library) and it shows the way to orchestrate your code to leverage the most from Guava (mainly first 4 chapters). Libraries like Guava usually do not live by themselves and this book is aware of this fact and provides examples that are set in dependency injection framework (Spring). There is a set of unit tests for each chapter that provides the means to check the functionality of explained code.
Where it comes short
I have nothing criticize when it comes to the content of the book. Every chapter provides plenty of useful examples and suitable explanation and covers most important concepts from given area of Guava. The only aspect that was not entirely perfected was the formatting side of the book. Some code snippets could use better formatting and also fonts used in the book are not quite uniform. There were some issues with code samples presented in the book (like code that will not compile due to the use of multiple double quotes, doubled annotations and other). I submitted all encountered issues and based on the word from publisher these issues will be reviewed by editorial team so we might get updated version soon.
Conclusion
After reading this book I felt satisfied and also enlightened in a way. Some of the concepts explained by the book were entirely new to me and some chapters deepened my knowledge in their respected areas. When it comes to deciding whether to read this book or not I would recommend reading it. It has something for everyone and while reading it you will find yourself thinking I had to do this at one point and you will be presented with one possible way of solving given problem in quite an elegant way. To conclude this review – definitely worth reading.
January 17, 2014
I was asked once during a job interview «Why do you appreciate Google libraries so much?». The question was asked in a company that makes most of its profits out of Google’s Android technology.
Google gives a lot of its technologies to open source community. But the most interesting thing is the quality of code base in that projects. I’ve seen most of Java libraries brought by the company and they look astonishing!
If you’ve ever heard about such people as Joshua Bloch, Kevin Bourrillion, Chet Haase and Thor Norbye you’d understand why i use Google’s libraries in every project i touch.
Enough blabbing, this book is about one of the Google’s effort to mitigate the age of «Java the language» — Google Guava (formerly Google collections). The book has 142 pages.
Look at the contents:
Chapter 2: Basic Guava Utilities
Chapter 3: Functional Programming with Guava
Chapter 4: Working with Collections
Chapter 5: Concurrency
Chapter 6: Guava Cache
Chapter 7: The EventBus Class
Chapter 8: Working with Files
Chapter 9: Odds and Ends
Looks clumsy? Yes, it is! Basically the most valuable part of the book are the code examples. The rest will give you the same pleasure as reading JavaDoc.
My score is 2 out of 5.
Google gives a lot of its technologies to open source community. But the most interesting thing is the quality of code base in that projects. I’ve seen most of Java libraries brought by the company and they look astonishing!
If you’ve ever heard about such people as Joshua Bloch, Kevin Bourrillion, Chet Haase and Thor Norbye you’d understand why i use Google’s libraries in every project i touch.
Enough blabbing, this book is about one of the Google’s effort to mitigate the age of «Java the language» — Google Guava (formerly Google collections). The book has 142 pages.
Look at the contents:
Chapter 2: Basic Guava Utilities
Chapter 3: Functional Programming with Guava
Chapter 4: Working with Collections
Chapter 5: Concurrency
Chapter 6: Guava Cache
Chapter 7: The EventBus Class
Chapter 8: Working with Files
Chapter 9: Odds and Ends
Looks clumsy? Yes, it is! Basically the most valuable part of the book are the code examples. The rest will give you the same pleasure as reading JavaDoc.
My score is 2 out of 5.
September 5, 2013
Nice introduction to the Google Guava Library. It has clear examples that makes more easy the usage of this library. The author makes a complete description of what can be do with the library since the way of writting code using functional programming, manage of concurrency to how to deal with files. I will prefer some examples to deal with map reduce.
April 24, 2014
If you haven't heard of Google Guava library, this book is a great starter..
September 1, 2015
short and nice, book for one evening
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews