August 2017
Intermediate to advanced
319 pages
6h 50m
English
Content preview from Modern Java Recipes
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Chapter 1. The Basics
The biggest change in Java 8 is the addition of concepts from functional programming to the language. Specifically, the language added lambda expressions, method references, and streams.
If you haven’t used the new functional features yet, you’ll probably be surprised by how different your code will look from previous Java versions. The changes in Java 8 represent the biggest changes to the language ever. In many ways, it feels like you’re learning a completely new language.
The question then becomes: Why do this? Why make such drastic changes to a language that’s already twenty years old and plans to maintain backward compatibility? Why make such dramatic revisions to a language that has been, by all accounts, extremely successful? Why switch to a functional paradigm after all these years of being one of the most successful object-oriented languages ever?
The answer is that the software development world has changed, so languages that want to be successful in the future need to adapt as well. Back in the mid-’90s, when Java was shiny and new, Moore’s law1 was still fully in force. All you had to do was wait a couple of years and your computer would double in speed.
Today’s hardware no longer relies on increasing chip density for speed. Instead, even most phones have multiple cores, which means software needs to be written expecting to be run in a multiprocessor environment. Functional programming, with its emphasis on “pure” functions (that return the same ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.