Q: Can I get good advice from books on Java?

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Q: Can I get good advice from books on Java?

Bad. Most Java books are written by people who couldn't get a job as a Java programmer (since programming almost always pays more than book writing; I know because I've done both). These books are full of errors, bad advice, and bad programs. These books are dangerous to the beginner, but are easily recognized and rejected by a programmer with even a little experience in another language.

Excellent. There are a small number of excellent Java books. I like the official specification and the books by Arnold and Gosling, Marty Hall, and Peter van der Linden. For reference I like the Java in a Nutshell series and the online references at Sun (I copy the javadoc APIs and the language specification and its amendments to my local disk and bookmark them in my browser so I'll always have fast access.)

Iffy. In between these two extremes is a collection of sloppy writing by people who should know better, but either haven't taken the time to really understand how Java works, or are just rushing to get something published fast. One such example of half-truths is Edward Yourdon's Java and the new Internet programming paradigm from Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer [footnote on Yourdon]. Here's what Yourdon says about how different Java is:

• "Functions have been eliminated" It's true that there is no "function" keyword in Java. Java calls them methods (and Perl calls them subroutines, and Scheme calls them procedures, but you wouldn't say these languages have eliminated functions). One could reasonably say that there are no global functions in Java. But I think it would be more precise to say that there are functions with global extent; its just that they must be defined within a class, and are called "static method C.f" instead of "function f".
• "Automatic coercions of data types have been eliminated" It's true that there are limits in the coercions that are made, but they are far from eliminated. You can still say (1.0 + 2) and 2 will be automatically coerced to a double. Or you can say ("one" + 2) and 2 will be coerced to a string.
• "Pointers and pointer arithmetic have been eliminated" It's true that explicit pointer arithmetic has been eliminated (and good riddance). But pointers remain; in fact, every reference to an object is a pointer. (That's why we have NullPointerException.) It is impossible to be a competent Java programmer without understanding this. Every Java programmer needs to know that when you do:

      int[] a = {0, 1, 2};
      int[] b = a;
      b[0] = 99;
  

  then a[0] is 99 because a and b are pointers (or references) to the same object.
• "Because structures are gone, and arrays and strings are represented as objects, the need for pointers has largely disappeared." This is also misleading. First of all, structures aren't gone, they're just renamed "classes". What is gone is programmer control over whether structure/class instances are allocated on the heap or on the stack. In Java all objects are allocated on the heap. That is why there is no need for syntactic markers (such as *) for pointers--if it references an object in Java, it's a pointer. Yourdan is correct in saying that having pointers to the middle of a string or array is considered good idiomatic usage in C and assembly language (and by some people in C++), but it is neither supported nor missed in other languages.
• Yourdon also includes a number of minor typos, like saying that arrays have a length() method (instead of a length field) and that modifiable strings are represented by StringClass (instead of StringBuffer). These are annoying, but not as harmful as the more basic half-truths.

This tip is reprinted on JavaFAQ.nu by by courtesy of Peter Norvig I am thankful for his important contributions to my site - 21 Infrequently Answered Java Questions. Alexandre Patchine

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Q: What other operations are surprisingly slow?

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Q: What other operations are surprisingly slow?

• These were all done in 1998. Compilers have changed since then.
• Counting down (i.e. for (int i=n; i>0; i--)) is twice as fast as counting up: my machine can count down to 144 million in a second, but up to only 72 million.
• Calling Math.max(a,b) is 7 times slower than (a > b) ? a : b. This is the cost of a method call.
• Arrays are 15 to 30 times faster than Vectors. Hashtables are 2/3 as fast as Vectors.
• Using bitset.get(i) is 60 times slower than bits & 1 << i. This is the cost of a synchronized method call, mostly. Of course, if you want more than 64 bits, you can't use my bit-twiddling example. Here's a chart of times for getting and setting elements of various data structures:
  

  K/sec uSecs Code Operation ========= ======= ==================== =========== 147,058 0.007 a = a & 0x100; get element of int bits 314 3.180 bitset.get(3); get element of Bitset 20,000 0.050 obj = objs[1]; get element of Array 5,263 0.190 str.charAt(5); get element of String 361 2.770 buf.charAt(5); get element of StringBuffer 337 2.960 objs2.elementAt(1); get element of Vector 241 4.140 hash.get("a"); get element of Hashtable 336 2.970 bitset.set(3); set element of Bitset 5,555 0.180 objs[1] = obj; set element of Array 355 2.810 buf.setCharAt(5,' ') set element of StringBuffer 308 3.240 objs2.setElementAt(1 set element of Vector 237 4.210 hash.put("a", obj); set element of Hashtable

• Java compilers are very poor at lifting constant expressions out of loops. The C/Java for loop is a bad abstraction, because it encourages re-computation of the end value in the most typical case. So for(int i=0; i is three times slower than int len = str.length(); for(int i=0; i

This tip is reprinted on JavaFAQ.nu by by courtesy of Peter Norvig I am thankful for his important contributions to my site - 21 Infrequently Answered Java Questions. Alexandre Patchine

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