Email to my wife’s cousin: Software development resources

One of my wife’s cousins is graduating from college in the spring, and she was offered a job doing software development. She called and we spoke about what it’s like to be a software developer day-to-day. When we were done talking she asked me if I had any resources I could share to help her get started with learning about Java development. Here’s what I sent her.


Hey Cuz!

Below are three books that might be of interest to you. I don’t expect you to read all three. Most developers are lucky to read one book a year. These are just suggestions of books you might want to know about. I’d start with Head First Java.

Also, I have listed several concepts you might want to be familiar with. DON’T FREAK OUT! I know it’s a lot of information. I don’t expect you to learn all of that stuff. Just skim it so that if someone says, “we deploy our application on Tomcat,” you will have seen the word “Tomcat” before.

I recommend that you download a copy of the Eclipse IDE, install it, and use it to work through some examples from Head First Java.

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any more questions. You can reach me at this email address or on my cell phone at [REDACTED SON!].

Good luck!

Books

Head First Java, 2nd Edition by Kathy Sierra

If you want to learn basic Java programming, this is where I would start.

Head First Java Cover


Effective Java (2nd Edition) by Joshua Bloch

This is my favorite Java book. I refer to it regularly. It’s the only one I have read cover to cover.

Effective Java Cover


Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, 2nd Edition by Steve McConnell

This book is more about programming in general. Pick up a copy from your library if you can and thumb through it. It might have some interesting stuff in it.

Code Complete Cover

Useful Website

Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/

This is the largest question and answer site for programmers. It is an invaluable resource if you have programming questions. Here’s a link to my Stack Overflow profile page if you want to see the kinds of questions a web developer might ask.

Concepts

Again, DON’T FREAK OUT! This is just a list of stuff an enterprise Java developer might work with. Just skim some of the web pages and familiarize yourself with some of the concepts if you have time.

StackOverflow: An invaluable tool in my developer toolbelt

stack-overflow-logo.png

It feels odd to even mention this site since I use it so often, but I still meet software developers who have never heard of Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers.” I’ve asked and answered a number of questions on the site, and it’s my go to place on the web when I have a software development or programming question of any kind. When I see Stack Overflow in my search results, it’s usually the link I click on first.

Here’s a link to my profile if you want to see the kinds of questions you can ask and get answers to.

Elixir: functional language built on the Erlang VM

Elixir logo

From the Elixir website (via Tim Bray’s blog) :

Elixir is a functional, meta-programming aware language built on top of the
Erlang VM. It is a dynamic language with flexible syntax and macro support that
leverages Erlang’s abilities to build concurrent, distributed and fault-tolerant
applications with hot code upgrades.

Elixir also provides first-class support for pattern matching, polymorphism via
protocols (similar to Clojure’s), aliases and associative data structures
(usually known as dicts or hashes in other programming languages).

Finally, Elixir and Erlang share the same bytecode and data types. This means
you can invoke Erlang code from Elixir (and vice-versa) without any conversion
or performance hit. This allows a developer to mix the expressiveness of Elixir
with the robustness and performance of Erlang.

DynJS: an ECMAScript (JavaScript) runtime for the JVM

From the DynJS website:

  • DynJS comes with a binary that you can use to execute Javascript files on the command line.
  • DynJS can be embedded into an existing Java application to provide JavaScript scripting abilities from your Java projects.

Command Line

$ ./bin/dynjs --help
Usage: dynjs [--console |--debug | --help | --version |FILE]
Starts the dynjs console or executes FILENAME depending the parameters

 FILE      : File to be executed by dynjs
 --console : Opens a REPL console to test small expressions.
 --debug   : Run REPL in debug mode.
 --help    : Shows current screen. Running without parameters also shows this.
 --version : Shows current dynjs version.

$ cat my_app.js
print("Hi! What's your name?");
var sayHello = function(name) {
    print("Hello " + name);
}

System = java.lang.System;
scanner = new java.util.Scanner(System.in);
name = scanner.nextLine();
sayHello(name);

$ ./bin/dynjs my_app.js
Hi! What's your name?
Douglas
Hello Douglas
^D

Embedding

import org.dynjs.Config;
import org.dynjs.exception.ThrowException;
import org.dynjs.runtime.*;

public class ScriptRunner {
  DynJS dynjs;
  Config config;

  public ScriptRunner() {
    config = new Config();
    dynjs  = new DynJS(config);
  }

  public Object runScript(String fileName) {
    Runner runner = dynjs.newRunner();
    return runner.withSource(new File(fileName)).execute();
  }

  public Object eval(String code) {
    return dynjs.evaluate(code);
  }

}

Vert.x: application server & framework designed for concurrency that supports mutiple languages on the JVM

From the Vert.x website:

Vert.x is a lightweight, high performance application platform for the JVM that’s designed for modern mobile, web, and enterprise applications.

  • Write your application components in Java, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, Ruby, Python or Groovy, or mix and match several programming languages in a
    single app.
  • Scales using messaging passing to efficiently utilise your server cores.
  • Uses non blocking I/O to serve many connections with minimal threads.
  • Simple actor-like concurrency model frees you from the pitfalls of traditional multi-threaded programming.
  • WebSockets and SockJS support for real-time server-push applications.
  • If you don’t want the whole platform, Vert.x can be embedded as a library in your existing Java applications.
  • 100% open source. Licensed under the Apache Software License 2.0

I like the fact that I can embed it in my app running on the app server of my choice. It also seems to offer lots of flexibility in its concurrnency model. I’m going to poke around to see if I can find examples of medium to large applications running on Vert.x.

Everything Search: A fast and easy Windows file finder

Everything Search screenshot

Everything Search is one of my favorite freeware Windows tools. It watches the filesystem journal for changes, making it very fast and up-to-date in nearly real time.

From the website:

“Everything” is an administrative tool that locates files and folders by filename instantly for Windows.
Unlike Windows search “Everything” initially displays every file and folder on your computer (hence the name “Everything”).
You type in a search filter to limit what files and folders are displayed.

  • Small installation file
  • Clean and simple user interface
  • Quick file indexing
  • Quick searching
  • Minimal resource usage
  • Share files with others easily
  • Real-time updating

gevent: coroutine-based Python networking library

I learned about this from the FLOSS Weekly podcast . I’ve become more interested in event-driven frameworks lately because of Node.js and Vert.x.

From the gevent website:

gevent is a coroutine-based Python networking library that uses greenlet to provide a high-level synchronous API on top of the libev event loop.

Features include:

  • Fast event loop based on libev (epoll on Linux, kqueue on FreeBSD).
  • Lightweight execution units based on greenlet.
  • API that re-uses concepts from the Python standard library (for example there are Events and Queues).
  • Cooperative sockets with SSL support »
  • DNS queries performed through threadpool or c-ares.
  • Monkey patching utility to get 3rd party modules to become cooperative