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Title: Java Platform Performance: Strategies and Tactics by Steve Wilson, Jeff Kesselman ISBN: 0201709694 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 31 May, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.87
Rating: 2
Summary: Shallow coverage with some redeeming utility
Comment: The table of contents is deceptive, because all of the important optimization topics are covered, including the Java-specific ones. The problem is, most of these topics are not covered in any depth beyond a simple introduction. I like terse books and believe most books about computers these days are way too fat; my hats are off to Addison Wesley for controlling that tendency with well edited books in this series. This book is thin at 230 pages, but unfortunately, a lot of that is filler of the "let me tell you what I'm going to tell you, tell you, and then tell you what I told you variety.
The advice is generally sound, such as "use a profiler to decide what to optimize", but all too often the advice stops there. One learns that linked lists are fast for deletes and array lists are fast for random access. But what if neither has the performance characteristics you need?
I would recommend Jon Bentley's "Programming Pearls" for someone who really wants to get a feel for optimization through a number of tight case studies. The examples may be C, but they're insightful and more applicable to the problems you're likely to face than the ones encountered when writing the Swing or Collections classes themselves. Then go out and use a serious optimizer like Quantify, which is essentially what the authors of this book suggest. At that point, you'll wonder why the authors stopped their review of Collections with Sun's built-in implementations.
The code for running mulitple programs and controlling class loading in Chapter 6, though I have not tried it, is interesting and something I'd not seen elsewhere. Other diversions, such as timers and threading in Swing are covered elsewhere. What would have been helpful is a detailed look at debugging threading performance, say through object, resource or thread pooling (an idea dismissed earlier for "small objects").
One glaring omission is a serious micro-benchmarking of basic operations. I found the comparison of speed when using final vs. non-final classes or methods to be startling in practice, and numbers here would help. Similarly, access times for hash tables vs. arrays, simple object construction times, floating point vs. integer arithmetic times, object variable vs. local variable access, etc. There are some wonderful micro-benchmark applets on the web with this functionality. What you'll learn is that up-casting takes forever, so any use of built-in collections/iterators for performance-critical operations will do you in.
I found the constant sales pitch for the Sun HotSpot (TM) Virtual Machine a bit tiring. It concludes with a recapitulation of the marketing materials in Appendix B. It is alternately described as "highly optimized", "state-of-the-art", having a "superior memory allocator", "ultra-fast", having "excellent multiprocessor performance characteristics", having "agressive inlining", having "excellent paging", etc. etc. The appendix devoted to HotSpot (TM) is particularly noteworty for its omission of any profiling information!
Rating: 5
Summary: Improve your Java by shedding its myths
Comment: There are a number of things everybody 'knows' about Java. Bad things such as "It's slow (but can be speeded up by calling native methods)" or good things such as "It doesn't leak memory". Unfortunately, like most things, the truth is more complicated.
Wilson and Kesselman have done an excellent job of getting under the bonnet (or hood for those in the US) of Java whilst firmly remaining practical rather than theoretical.
I bought the book because we suspected memory leakage problems in one of our applets but couldn't find much information on the subject elsewhere. The net result is that we've had our eyes opened to a number of issues we weren't aware of and have been able to tackle them with informed confidence rather than ill-educated guesswork.
A particular bonus is the information on benchmarking. So often we find we develop solutions on the basis of ease of coding rather than performance (not always bad thing). What I've found now is that I have greater confidence in both trying out different solutions and then concrete evidence with which I can justify my decisions to others.
Though not for beginners, I would reccommend this book as a good one for expanding your knowledge of how to deliver good, practical, faster and more robust Java. Being able to give sound background information on why you write a piece of code in a particular way is an important step on the way from being a developer to being a key developer.
Rating: 4
Summary: Great Book but should have been more detailed
Comment: I would definitely reccomend this book to someone who is not at all familiar with performance tactics in Java, but this book does not adds much to the much known tactics found on web or in the Dov Bulka's book.
Since this book was from Sun Press I definitely expected more from this book considering the depth provided by other books from them. But this book kinda embarrased me by reiterating the tricks already known and introducing the esoteric concept of benchmarking and not providing much details with it.
I hope somebody would come up with more exhaustive work in this field very soon....
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Title: Java Performance Tuning (2nd Edition) by Jack Shirazi ISBN: 0596003773 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: January, 2003 List Price(USD): $44.95 |
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Title: Server-Side Programming Techniques (Java(TM) Performance and Scalability, Volume 1) by Dov Bulka ISBN: 0201704293 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 02 June, 2000 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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Title: Effective Java Programming Language Guide by Joshua Bloch ISBN: 0201310058 Publisher: Addison Wesley Pub. Date: 05 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $39.99 |
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Title: Concurrent Programming in Java(TM): Design Principles and Pattern (2nd Edition) by Doug Lea ISBN: 0201310090 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 05 November, 1999 List Price(USD): $44.99 |
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Title: Enterprise Java Performance by Steven L. Halter, Steven J. Munroe ISBN: 0130172960 Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR Pub. Date: August, 2000 List Price(USD): $49.99 |
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