Author/s : Richard Reese
Publisher : P8Tech
Category :
Advanced Java
Review by : Jeanne Boyarsky
Rating : 8 horseshoes
"Java 8 New Features: A Practical Heads-Up Guide" is the first book I had read by the publisher P8 Tech. All their e-books are $9.99 (which should make Amazon happy; That's rare for a tech book). The difference is that the paper book is $19.99 making it a logical price.
This isn't some skimpy book though. It's 163 pages plus the appendix. Which is a perfectly reasonable amount to cover the material. The other
Java 8 book I read ("Java 8 for the Impatient" was also less than 200 pages and cost a standard computer book price of $39.99.)
While I hadn't heard of the publisher before, I had heard of the author. I read his "Java 7 New Features Cookbook" and enjoyed that.
Anyway, onto the review. I like that the material was presented in short code snippets. I like the book uses repetition and good code idioms. The book is printed in color which is nice for the keywords. I like the tables describing packages and classes. I like the coverage of functional programming. I like the list of packages in the compact profiles.
What didn't I like? I feel like the book could have used some more editing. It didn't affect readability, but I noticed a couple things like using "function programming" and "functional programming" in the same paragraph. I also couldn't determine any
pattern for when System.out::println was used vs the "long way". Nothing that affected understanding though.
There were only two pages on the new concurrency enhancements. I feel like this is an important topic and would have liked to see more. Essentially I liked both Java 8 books. This one certainly has the advantage of being $10 or $20!
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Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in
exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.
More info at Amazon.com 
