The following top long-lasting Java books have a big impact on every software developer because they teach techniques that stand the time test; they are books that will provide you with long-lasting knowledge and benefits. Code techniques, architecture, soft skills, and processes are topics that may change a little or not at all.
Without further ado, let’s see what those books are!
Also, by investing in one of the following book links, you will be helping maintain the Java Challengers blog with high-quality content. The following books are at the same price as if you go to Amazon directly, but I will earn a commission from them.
Clean Code – Uncle Bob
The Clean Code mindset is crucial so software developers can create high-quality code. This book, written by Uncle Bob, explains many techniques we can apply in our day-to-day jobs to build flexible code that can be easily fixed or expanded. Some of the topics of the book are code naming, writing concise methods, how to comment on your code formatting, objects and data structure, error handling, concurrency, refactoring, and tests. It’s a book software developers should read.
Clean Architecture – Uncle Bob
With the wrong architecture, a system might become a nightmare to maintain, scale, be performant, or be available. Choosing a reasonable architecture is crucial when creating a new project. The great thing about this book is that the architectural concepts are explained at the fundamental level. It doesn’t depend on frameworks, cloud platforms, or anything else that is constantly changing.
Pragmatic Programmer – David Thomas, Andrew Hunt
This book is an interesting one, it has a lot of wisdom regarding how to keep up to date with technologies, how to test to catch bugs early, and how to build a work process where we can deliver value with a project quickly. It’s not a technical book. Instead, it contains ideas from experienced software engineers that will help you to create high-quality software and stay sharp for the software development market.
Effective Java – Joshua Bloch
There are many concepts and features in Java that are still misunderstood, and the Effective Java book covers many advanced topics that make any experienced developer feel more humble because there are many impressive concepts in this book! If you are serious about creating high-quality code, the Effective Java book is a must-read and it’s one more book that will bring you long-lasting benefits because it’s related to core concepts of Java and not frameworks.
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software – Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides
The gang of four created the powerful Design Patterns book, providing object-oriented programming solutions to common problems in day-to-day work. To any Java developer who wants to go to the next level, reading this book will be a great help. This book is hard but is also rewarding to understand at least the most critical design patterns so when the opportunity to implement one comes, you know the right solution. Just be careful to not use a design pattern to solve a simple problem, it might be overkill.
Java Concurrency in Practice – Brian Goetz
It’s pretty common to deal with concurrency in day-to-day work. The Java Concurrency book will give you a great understanding of the fundamentals to benefit you most when implementing your concurrency solution. Even though the book is from Java 5, it is still relevant today because the concurrency concept is the same for newer Java versions.
Java Challengers – Rafael del Nero
Crack Open the Java Challengers Book and Get Coding
I put together a book that’s all about tackling those tricky Java code challenges that are actually enjoyable. It’s called the Java Challengers book, and it’s ready for you to flip through its pages.
Think of it as your informal guide to understanding Java inside and out. You’ll work through puzzles that will really test your Java knowledge, and before you know it, your Java skills will be as sharp as your favorite IDE’s autocomplete.
No fluff, just the good stuff that’ll have you nodding along and thinking, “Ah, so that’s how it works!” By the time you’re done, you’ll be writing code that’s clean, maintainable, and pretty much bug-proof.
So, are you in? Let’s get those Java gears turning!
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code – Martin Fowler
Code is and will always be where the action happens, even with all the crazy technologies we have nowadays, the code will be always where the information is manipulated. Therefore, it’s crucial to refactor code so that it’s easily read and maintained by other developers. Martin Fowler, the book’s creator, says, “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand”. With bad code, bugs easily hide and software developers’ life become a nightmare, they have to work overtime and don’t have any time for their families. It’s stressful. There is no learning and no growth.
The Java certification books are great for improving your Java skills. Getting the certification helps with your CV, too, but the book’s actual value is how much you learned and can accomplish with Java. Understanding Java deeply makes creating high-quality code more efficient since you will know the most important Java core features.
Concepts such as encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, error handling, streams, lambdas, functional interfaces, and concurrency are all addressed in the book, so it’s worth a read!
Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software – Eric Evans, Ross Venables
Absorbing the complexity of business requirements is a big challenge for software engineers, and the DDD book helps engineers tackle complexity more efficiently by using the book’s principles. It also helps build better code since by applying the book principles, and software developers will encapsulate the code better and improve communication between developers and users.
Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Fowler))
Nowadays, continuous delivery fundamentals are essential. Instead of going through a lot of stress during a software build, integration, and releasing it to production, we can automate the whole process. This book explores the fundamentals of continuous delivery so that developers deliver software reliably with automated steps. Delivering software in a manual process is no longer acceptable for most companies. Also, this book explores the idea of the DevOps culture. The DevOps culture defends the idea that developers, testers, and operations should work together to avoid the finger-pointing culture.
Continuous delivery becomes even more critical when we use microservices architecture. Considering that the vast majority of companies nowadays are adopting the microservices architecture, we need to learn the continuous delivery fundamentals to be able to create massive value for companies and deliver high-quality software where bugs have a hard time hiding.
Golden Lessons: 100 Insights to Overcome Life’s Challenges and Achieve Your Career Dreams – Rafael del Nero
Hey there! Don’t forget, I’ve added my book to the list. 🙂
“The Golden Lessons” isn’t just any book—it’s a mash-up of the smartest ideas from the best books I’ve read, plus my real-world know-how. It’s all about getting down to business with 100 clear lessons to power through life’s tough spots.
With the guidance on these pages, you’ll be equipped to aim high and charge full speed ahead in your career adventures.
Soft Skills: The Software Developer’s Life Manual (Second Edition) – John Sonmez
A significant part of software development is the technical side, but it’s not everything. To go to a whole new level, you also have to develop your soft skills, which are the ability to deal with other people, negotiate, market yourself, become a better communicator, and have better health. The fantastic Soft Skills book covers all those elements and more! In my opinion, it’s a must-read for all software engineers!
Cracking the Coding Interview – Gayle Laakmann McDowell
Even though we don’t need to use algorithm skills in a business system, it’s still a valuable skill to have, and, of course, many companies will test you with an algorithm. Algorithms will be always the root of programming, we can program in any language if we know algorithms very well.
An excellent exercise for every software engineer is to learn a new programming language every year, so why not learn algorithms along with the new language? By learning a new programming language, we expand our way of thinking and solve different problems in our day-to-day work.
Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems (Second edition)
Microservices architecture is currently everywhere in the market. Instead of having systems deployed on-premises, companies are now using cloud services to run their services. With microservices, many other concepts come into play, such as container orchestration, automation scripting, systems monitoring, networks, and having a macro understanding of what exactly microservices are very useful for every software engineer. Since the Building Microservices book is quite generic and microservices are the new default in the market, it is a good candidate for this book list!
Effective Software Testing: A Developer’s Guide
“Effective Software Testing: A Developer’s Guide” is a book that provides a comprehensive guide to software testing for developers. The book emphasizes the importance of testing in achieving high-quality software and offers practical advice on how to approach testing in a way that is effective and efficient.
The book covers various aspects of software testing, including test planning, design, automation, and management. It also discusses different testing techniques, such as unit testing, integration testing, and acceptance testing. The authors provide detailed examples and case studies to illustrate applying these techniques in practice.
The book highlights the importance of collaboration between developers and testers in achieving high-quality software. It also emphasizes the need for continuous testing throughout the software development lifecycle rather than treating testing as a separate phase.
To conclude, “Effective Software Testing: A Developer’s Guide” is a valuable resource for developers who want to improve their software testing skills and deliver high-quality software.
97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts
To finish with a flourish, top Java references gathered their wisdom in this book to help developers build high-quality, reliable code. Rather than learning all on your own, why not learn from the wisdom of Java developers who went through several problems and are passing on their wisdom to you? Find out the 97 things every Java programmer should know in this book!
I hope you enjoyed the article, and leave a comment about what your favorite book is mentioned here!
As always, stay constantly breaking your limits!
Hi Rafa,
Thanks for shared!!!!
All of them are very powerful to develop our carrers, not one is out of the topic. Maybe, I could add the book “Java 8 in action” write by Raul-Gabriel Urma, Mario Fusco and Alan Mycroft, this book helped me to understand the newer Lamda style.
Hi Manuel! You are very welcome and thanks for the tip, I will check this book out and I might include it in the book list!
Hi Rafal,
Where is the print version of your book
Functional Programming in Java, second edition & Modern Java in action might also be 2 nice additions.
Thanks for the suggestion, Simon! Those books are indeed very good and a good addition to the article!
This is also very good by O’Reilly
DevOps Tools for Java Developers: Best Practices from Source Code to Production Containers 1st Edition by Stephen Chin (Author), Melissa McKay (Author), Ixchel Ruiz (Author), Baruch Sadogursky (Author)