Rick Ross is the founder of Javalobby. He is a frequent speaker at Java-related events and a well-known advocate for Java developer interests.

The Rich Engineering Heritage Behind Dependency Injection

Andrew McVeigh takes us on a tour of the rich heritage behind dependency injection, what it represents, and tells us why its here to stay.

NetBeans 6: Matisse Updates

NetBeans 6 delivers great updates to the Matisse GUI builder. Spend a few minutes with Roman Strobl and get an expert briefing on what's new and what has changed. (sponsored)

Introduction to Groovy Part 3

In this, the third and final installation of Andres' Introduction to Groovy series, you learn about how Groovy handles variable numbers of arguments, named parameters, currying, and more about Groovy operators. Including, some new operators.

Easier Custom Components with Swing Fuse

Swing Fuse (actually just Fuse), is a framework designed to make it easier to create your own custom desktop components. In this article, Daniel Spiewak shows you how to get started and provides sample source code you can download.

Benchmark Analysis: Guice vs Spring

Willam Louth shows how he uses JXInsight Probes to investigate probable performance issues with code bases that he is not familiar with. He also highlights possible pitfalls in creating a benchmark, as well as in the analysis of results.

Javalobby Readers' Choice: Top Java Books

See the whole list!

There are evidently a lot of high-quality Java and programming books out there which your fellow Javalobby members would recommend. If you began right now reading the cumulative 72,079 pages of the titles they have recommended, and if you read fifty pages per day every day, then you would finish reading this collection sometime in the middle of January, 2013! Of course, there’s some question whether all of this material would still be relevant by then, and there’s also the small issue of whether you’d really want to fork over the $5,238.66 this library would cost if you paid full price for every title. Thank goodness for Amazon, that 38% savings would really matter here!

All kidding aside, I’d like to thank each and every person who took the time to contribute a list of five Java books every Java developer should own and read. All of you have performed a service that will help your fellow Java developers for a long time to come, and these recommendations are a real treasure trove of the collected wisdom you have gained from long experience. I am always proud to see Javalobby members step up to the plate to build our community by sharing their knowledge. This book discussion thread was a fine example of community input, and I hope the report Matt and I have prepared on the results will be interesting and enjoyable to all of you.

We combed through the entire thread and attempted to cull a list from every reply that reasonably seemed to provide one. It was fascinating to tabulate the results and see the patterns start to emerge. All told, over 50 members submitted lists for a total of 285 recommendations representing 112 distinct titles. We counted the votes for each title. Although there were some cases where postings said order was not significant, we did record the position of each vote in the member’s list. Without making any claim whatsoever to statistical significance, we have computed an “average position” value for each title to give some indication of whether it generally occurred early or late in someone’s list.

Below is a table of the Top 10 titles recommended by Javalobby members, and you can view the entire list of 112 titles at this page. As you can see, Josh Bloch’s Effective Java Programming Language Guide was the unequivocal frontrunner, garnering over 10% of the total votes. Also interesting to note is the fact that every one of the next four titles in the list contains the word “Design.” It seems clear that you give solid priority to design issues when selecting your reading material. The most expensive title would set you back over $100 (Understanding Object-Oriented Programming With Java by Timothy Budd.) The least expensive lists for just $10.99 (The Holy Bible, recommended by Rick J. Wagner “Because whatever you write won't matter in a few decades anyway. But what about you?”) If you don’t go for that sort of thing, Ken Richards recommends Small Stakes Hold'em - Winning big with Expert Play “because you can't program all the time and it's good to have a lucrative hobby.”

We had great difficulty attempting to make a merit-based judgment of which list should receive the $100 Amazon gift certificate as a prize. Eventually we gave up and asked Allan Chasanoff to pick a number between 1 and 50, which we used as an index into the submissions. He chose the number 7 which, by coincidence, is the number of the same Ken Richards above who recommended the poker book. Congratulations, Ken, I guess poker isn't your only way to win. We felt random selection was less than ideal, so we have decided to award a $10 Amazon gift certificate to each of the members who submitted a list. If you are one of the people who submitted you list on or before February 14, then please make sure your email address in your Javalobby profile is correct and watch for an email from us giving you instructions.

Overall we feel this was an intriguing exercise and that the results will be useful for some time to come. We’ll do more of these on specific topics, but we’ll definitely implement some technology to assist in the handling of list submission and reporting. The manual process we did this time is far too time-consuming, but it has given us some great ideas about how we can easily automate. I really like knowing what Javalobby members recommend, and I will look forward to your participation in future efforts. Thanks, everyone, and enjoy looking over the results!