Book Review - Better, Faster, Lighter Java

Ian Cooper mentioned this book on Twitter and since it was available for 33p on Amazon I couldn't resist buying it.

The book describes the lightweight processes and development practices that started in the Java space and have fed through into ALT.NET. The way the book sets out the vision is by breaking things down to five key principles:

1. Keep It Simple
2. Do One Thing, and Do It Well
3. Strive For Transparency
4. Allow for Extension
5. You are What You Eat

The first four principles each get their own chapter and in following chapters concrete examples, including Hibernate and Spring, are used to show how these principles improved the designs. These chapters worked really well and I also enjoyed the entirely relevant discussions on topics such as golden hammers, rewrite or replace and vendor sales processes. The authors are also pleasingly open-minded, absolutely no dogma here just pragmatic advice on how to create successful software.

So my opinion is that even though it is a Java book I think its worth a read, especially if you can get it for 33p :)

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