Well, for various reasons, it has been a long time coming, but finally, it is here. Developing Java Software is now in it's third edition. My advanced copies arrived with yesterday and it should be in the bookshops (at least in the US and UK) next week.
This third edition is very different to the second in so many ways:
- The overall scope of the book has been cut down so that it is better for use in 1 and 2 semester/term courses at universities. The material on algorithms and data structures and the ADS package has been taken out and will appear in a new book.
- Test-driven development has been made a core feature of the whole presentation. We always did push the unit testing line, now it is absolutely ‘front and centre’. We use TestNG as the unit test framework, as this looks destined to supplant JUnit as the de facto standard unit test framework.
- Java SE 5.0 is assumed. We don't make a huge song and dance about generics and annotations, we just use them as though they have always been there, in a way we think is entirely suitable for people learning Java as a first programming language.
- We have introduced material on Ant and Subversion so that people are learning about the tools of the trade at the same time that they are learning about programming itself.
We have set up a website to host support material associated with the book: http://www.devjavasoft.org.
We are regularly adding more and more answers to the questions set in the book onto the website so that people have a reference. Feel free to send in answers to questions not yet answered, or alternative answers to the ones we have – we will ensure any submissions are attributed.
Thanks to Amanda Makepeace for painting ‘The Forest Of Wic’ which is the basis for the artwork of the book cover.
