> if you are a Java 1.5 certified, that has worked a lot with Java 8, where do you start to catch up with the latest versions? does your book cover it all?
The book covers up to Java 17, and we've tried to pick the key features you'll use, or see in real life code (like lambdas and streams from 8, the convenience factory methods from Java 9, and a brief tour of records from Java 17). I've actually given talks basically on how to level up from Java 8 to more recent versions of Java, covering the key syntax and features that are most interesting to Java, most of the research I did for those talks ended up being how we decided what to cover in the book. So, short version is, the book covers the majority of what you need to know. Anything that isn't covered, there are talks, blogs and videos on, some of which I did
> and last but not least... Do you guys have a favorite new feature? pleaase explain
Records are my favourite new feature! I'm not one to complain about "boilerplate code" in Java, I've worked with it for so long I'm comfortable with classes with getters, setters, hashcode, toString and equals methods, but it really is lovely to work with a data class which is defined just using a couple of lines of code.