The fun thing about Venkat Subramaniam’s latest book is the way he jumps to and fro between a couple of JVM based languages: Java, Scala and Clojure. He shows interesting ways to do given tasks in different languages and introduces a couple of interesting frameworks I at least have not heard of before. The most interesting frameworks he shows are Akka, which is an Actor Based Concurrency Framework, written in Scala but which comes with an API that is just as well usabale from Java. Furthermore, I knew the concepts of Software Transactional Memory but did not know that there are working implementations for the JVM. One of them beeing Multiverse.
I really liked the book, because I really like the idea of using a framwork implemented in Scala through its Java API in Groovy. Sometimes it gets quite tiresome to have many of the same examples just shown in different languages, but it is always good to practice Scala or Clojure reading skills. If you feel safe in Java concurrency, i.e. you now Concurrency in Practice by heart, I warmly recommend this book.
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