Effective Java, 3rd Edition

Chapter 6. Enums and Annotations

JAVA supports two special-purpose families of reference types: a kind of class called an enum type, and a kind of interface called an annotation type. This chapter discusses best practices for using these type families.

Item 34: Use enums instead of int constants

An enumerated type is a type whose legal values consist of a fixed set of constants, such as the seasons of the year, the planets in the solar system, or the suits in a deck of playing cards. Before enum types were added to the language, a common pattern for representing enumerated types was to declare a group of named int constants, one for each member of the type:

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// The int enum pattern - severely deficient! public static ...