notes/review "JavaSE 8 for the Really Impatient"
Cay S. Horstmann
4/30/14
My initial reaction to this book was that it was a "Cliff Notes" book of SE 8. It is much more than just an effort to highlight changes and additions to SE 8.
The discussion of lambda expressions - functions - interfaces, streams, parallel operations, collections, parameter types, etc., is as well covered as in any other contemporary publication. However, this author doesn't throw out diagrams to explain "how" concepts work, and doesn't present long comprehensive examples of code.
What is really unique here, is that both JavaFX-FXML, and Nashorn are given coverage with good explanations and even example code. It seems that nearly all other authors have chosen to totally ignore these aspects of Java SE. Even if the other authors consider them irrelevant or too new to be well developed, the topics are there and are being ignored. This book even gives useful examples for scripting, and points to the replacement of Swing.
There are chapters here devoted to the revised Date and Time API, concurrency changes, a section summarizing Java 7 "new" features that are important in Java 8, and a section for miscellaneous changes to the topic items of strings, the numbers class, new math functions, collections classes changes, annotations, nulls, and a few other items.
This book is not designed to initially teach any aspect of the Java language or platform.
I have gone through it 3 or so times, and find new relevance each time and I have a fairly good background in Java having used it for development since '99. The book does seem to require research or parallel documentation at hand in order to fully grasp or expand some concepts.