33 Books Like Sunbirds

Erotic Triangles returns to a part of the world I know well, though the topic is alien to my own natural resource emphasis. Yet I found it fascinating for its symbolic analyses of West Java’s musical and art worlds – intertwined intimately with the relations between men and women and among men. Its emphasis on triangles was the inspiration for me to structure my own analyses as a harp (another ‘triangle’), within which the strings signify traits that men value in a given culture. Spiller’s analysis inspired my own analogy between the creation of harp music and the clusters of values that influence men’s identities, their personal and cultural ‘songs.’

When seeking a book on how to use a language effectively, getting one written by someone who helped design and implement the language is usually a great idea. With Effective Java, you get a book written by someone who contributed a significant amount to the language: Joshua Bloch had a lot to do with the design of the Java 5.0 features circa 2004, which is where Java moved for me from "inelegant" to "hey I can finally make things look good in this language." Bloch goes into considerable and passionate depth about each of the 90 items in the 2018 edition and will help you ensure you don't make the mistakes that can lead to defective or bad code.

To be honest, I did not expect to learn something new from this book, given the fact that I have been working on enterprise-level applications since high school, which mostly follow a microservice architecture. 

Still, I have to admit that in Richardson's discussion on decomposition strategies, inter-service communication, and managing distributed data, I still got some valuable insights into dealing with such an architecture. Particularly, the saga pattern for managing transactions was definitely a game-changer for me.

This tour of programming is a humorous reminder that we should always question our assumptions.

This book presents example after example of very simple Java programs all of which behave differently than you expect. It's both humbling and so provocative that you have to go into an editor and see if their claims are true.

Although I have done very little ethnographic research in Java, I worked closely with Javanese transmigrants in West Sumatra. Peluso’s book provided me with additional understanding of the world from which these folks were likely to have come.  It also provided useful historical and contemporary material on Indonesian policies relating to forests that were very useful for me to know. The book has become a classic in the field!

Written over 160 years ago, this book was one of the earliest works of literature that exposed the horrors of European colonialism. By using scathing wit, Multatuli weaved together a story that shamed a system that committed terrible crimes that, at that point in time, many Europeans were ignorant of.

Despite the book being written so long ago, not a shred of its incisiveness has been lost. I believe this book is a great example of how fearlessly written prose about a reality people don’t want to, or can’t, see can lead to direct changes in that reality in the short and long term (Pramoedya Ananta Toer, author of the powerful "Buru Quartet" was quoted as saying, "Max Havelaar was the book that killed colonialism"). I remain in awe of how the story so skillfully utilized controlled outrage to take on something as terrible as the colonization of Indonesia.

By contrast to my previous 20-year-old book recommendation, this one is brand new.

When I was learning Java, we used the (now classic) “Gang of Four” book for Patterns. For design patterns, language syntax does matter. Miro covers the Gang of Four patterns and new ones using the same categories – creational, structural, and behavioral.

Miro also adds concurrency and anti-patterns which weren’t in the original GoF. I like that he includes review questions. This is very key info to know and mastering it with a modern book is very useful. Plus Miro includes examples of that pattern in the JDK itself.

Mastering a tool like Hibernate is essential when dealing with Spring Boot and databases, as it can simplify the development process if used correctly.

I was particularly impressed by how the authors tackled complex concepts like caching, lazy loading, and transaction management, making them accessible and relatable to persons with zero to no experience, and also making sure that someone with experience does not get bored either.

I found that managing entities correctly and knowing how to deal with JPQL automatically results in a cleaner, more scalable, and performant code base. 

When trying to become a better Java developer, there is so much to learn.

97 Things covers, well 97, of them in a series of brief essays. What’s cool is that the essays were written by different people so you get lots of points of view on what is important. Topics range from language (comments, fat jars) to the ecosystem (benchmarking, frequent releases) to the language-agnostic (definition of done and breaking down problems.)

Note that two of these are mine. The book is thin at just over 200 pieces. And since each “thing” is short, it’s easy to read on the go.

Unless you are writing a greenfield app, you have legacy code around. And even if you are on a greenfield app, you are writing legacy code right now.

This book gives you techniques for working on such a codebase. It is a really good read for learning how to refactor safely so you can work with what you are inheriting. You might notice this book is 20 years old. It’s just as relevant today as when I first read it in 2004. The concepts don’t depend on the exact language syntax.

In fact, some of the examples are in a mix of Java, C#, and C++. I really appreciate the perspective on testing that I got by reading this book.