This comprehensive guide shows you how to master the most important changes to Java since it was first released. Generics and the greatly expanded collection libraries have tremendously increased the power of Java 5 and Java 6. But they have also confused many developers who haven't known how to take advantage of these new features.

Java Generics and Collections covers everything from the most basic uses of generics to the strangest corner cases. It teaches you everything you need to know about the collections libraries, so you'll always know which collection is appropriate for any given task, and how to use it.

Topics covered include:

• Fundamentals of generics: type parameters and generic methods

• Other new features: boxing and unboxing, foreach loops, varargs

• Subtyping and wildcards

• Evolution not revolution: generic libraries with legacy clients and generic clients with legacy libraries

• Generics and reflection

• Design patterns for generics

• Sets, Queues, Lists, Maps, and their implementations

• Concurrent programming and thread safety with collections

• Performance implications of different collections

Generics and the new collection libraries they inspired take Java to a new level. If you want to take your software development practice to a new level, this book is essential reading.

Philip Wadler is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, where his research focuses on the design of programming languages. He is a co-designer of GJ, work that became the basis for generics in Sun's Java 5.0.

Maurice Naftalin is Technical Director at Morningside Light Ltd., a software consultancy in the United Kingdom. He has most recently served as an architect and mentor at NSB Retail Systems plc, and as the leader of the client development team of a major UK government social service system.

"A brilliant exposition of generics. By far the best book on the topic, it provides a crystal clear tutorial that starts with the basics and ends leaving the reader with a deep understanding of both the use and design of generics." Gilad Bracha, Java Generics Lead, Sun Microsystems

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 23 Ratings

Explains the inexplicable - 2008-10-17
Reviewer Rating:
There are some difficult issues with Java Generics. This book does an excellent job explaining them. It also provides a good guide when to use generics, its limitations, and the new limitations that it introduces for arrays.

Concise and useful. - 2009-08-14
Reviewer Rating:
This book is very useful.

It is in fact, ridiculously concise. It may seem like a flimsy little workbook, but somehow a ton of information is fit in it. Generally I can read about ~40 pages per hour, but on this I can barely get a third of that done, so don't be fooled by it's size.

It does start off assuming you have a general background knowledge, so don't attempt it until you do.

Some good information - 2009-05-13
Reviewer Rating:
While the author spends too much time on what he thinks Java should be and what Sun needs to do to fix it, there is a lot of good and useful data to be had from the text.

Complete and precise in contents, somewhat confusing in presentation - 2008-12-18
Reviewer Rating:
You will find everything you need to know in this thorough book. But be prepared the most advanced chapters are right at the beginning: A tough start easing off to light reading at the end.

Some concepts are explained in a counter intuitive way: A new concept is explained and within a few sentences the point of view is reversed.
This book helped me to reduce some of my @SuppressWarnings("unchecked") annotations.

The overview of the collection classes themselves is excellent and described very clearly.

Very Thorough, Maybe Too Much So - 2008-10-10
Reviewer Rating:
This book has very in-depth information on Java generics, but some of the details are just not that interesting to the practical developer. It helps you gain a deeper understanding, but you probably want to first know what generics are, how to use them, when to use them, and best practices for using them before you get into the nitty-gritty of how the compiler represents them in byte code and what "reification" means.

I also found it strange that symbols like T and E that are not familiar to pre Java 1.5 developers are bandied about without first telling you what they mean.

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