Why We Wrote This Book

Over the years we have built up a wealth of experience around teaching developers to code. We have both written books on Java 8 onward and run training courses around professional software development. In the process we’ve been recognized as Java Champions and international conference speakers.

We’ve found over the years that many developers could benefit from either an introduction or a refresher on several core topics. Design patterns, functional programming, SOLID principles, and testing are practices that often get good coverage in their own right, but it’s rarely shown how they work well and fit together. People sometimes even get put off from improving their skills simply due to the paralysis of choice over what to learn. We want to not only teach people core skills, but do so in a way that’s easy to approach and fun, too.

A Developer-Oriented Approach

This book also gives you the opportunity to learn in a developer-oriented way. It contains plenty of code samples and whenever we introduce a topic we always provide concrete code examples. You get all the code for the projects within the book, so if you want to follow along you can even step through the book code in an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) or run the programs in order to try them out.

Another common bugbear when it comes to technical books is that they are often written in a formal, lecturing style. That’s not how normal people speak to each other! In this book you’ll get a conversational style that helps to engage you in the content rather than being patronizing.

What’s in the Book?

Each chapter is structured around a software project. At the end of a chapter, if you’ve been following along, you should be able to write that project. The projects start off as simple command-line batch programs but grow in complexity to fully fledged applications.

You’ll benefit from a project-driven structure in a variety of ways. First, you get to see how different programming techniques work together in an integrated setting. When we look at functional programming toward the end of the book, it isn’t just abstract collection-processing operations—they’re presented in order to calculate actual results used by the project in question. This solves the problem of educational material showing good ideas or approaches, but developers often use them inappropriately or out of context.

Second, a project-driven approach helps ensure that at each stage you see realistic examples. Educational materials are often full of example classes called Foo and methods called bar. Our examples are relevant to the projects in question and show how to apply the ideas to real problems, similar to the ones that you may encounter in your career.

Finally, it’s more fun and engaging to learn this way. Each chapter is a fresh project and a fresh opportunity to learn new things. We want you to read through to the end and really enjoy turning the pages as you’re reading. The chapters start with a challenge that will be solved, walk you through the solution, and then end by evaluating what you learned and how the challenge was solved. We specifically call out the challenge at the beginning and end of every chapter to ensure that its goals are clear to you.

Who Should Read This Book?

We’re confident that developers from a wide variety of backgrounds will find things that are useful and interesting in this book. Having said that, there are some people who will get the maximum value out of this book.

Junior software developers, often just out of university or a couple of years into their programming career, are who we think of as the core audience for this book. You’ll learn about fundamental topics that we expect to be of relevance throughout your software development career. You don’t need to have a university degree by any means, but you do need to know the basics of programming in order to make the best use of this book. We won’t explain what an if statement or a loop is, for example.

You don’t need to know much about object-oriented or functional programming in order to get started. In Chapter 2, we make no assumptions beyond that you know what a class is and can use collections with generics (e.g., List<String>). We take it right from the basics.

Another group who will find this book of particular interest is developers learning Java while coming from another programming language, such as C#, C++, or Python. This book helps you quickly get up to speed with the language constructs and also the principles, practices, and idioms that are important to write good Java code.

If you’re a more experienced Java developer, you may want to skip Chapter 2 in order to avoid repeating basic material that you already know, but Chapter 3 onward will be full of concepts and approaches that will be of benefit to many developers.

We’ve found that learning can be one of the most fun parts of software development and hope that you’ll find that as well when reading this book. We hope you have fun on this journey.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Italic

Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.

Constant width

Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords.

Constant width bold

Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user.

Constant width italic

Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values or by values determined by context.

Using Code Examples

Supplemental material (code examples, exercises, etc.) is available for download at https://github.com/Iteratr-Learning/Real-World-Software-Development.

If you have a technical question or a problem using the code examples, please send email to [email protected].

This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, if example code is offered with this book, you may use it in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing examples from O’Reilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission.

We appreciate, but generally do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For example: “Real-World Software Development by Raoul-Gabriel Urma and Richard Warburton (O’Reilly). Copyright 2020 Functor Ltd. and Monotonic Ltd., 978-1-491-96717-1.”

If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given above, feel free to contact us at [email protected].

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