“Absolutely amazing! A page turner, just like Harry Potter for the technically minded.” —Tobias Svensson from review at return 42;
“This book is so interesting I did 60 minutes on the treadmill yesterday instead of the usual 30 because I couldn’t stop reading.” —Joel Spolsky on Joel on Software
“Coders at Work should inspire readers to learn about the wider context of their craft and stop the reinvention of the proverbial wheel” —Vladimir Sedach from review at Slashdot
“Peter Seibel asks the sort of questions only a fellow programmer would ask. Reading this book may be the next best thing to chatting with these illustrious programmers in person.” —Ehud Lamm, Founder of Lambda the Ultimate - the programming languages weblog
“I highly recommend it.” —Andy Mulholland, CTO, Capgemini
“I have long known the names and of the work of about half of the programmers in Peter Seibel’s wonderful book, Coders at Work; and it is fascinating to read their ideas about their lives and their ideas about programming. Better yet, I have now learned about the lives and philosophies of the other half of the programmers in the book, whose systems were known to me but the programmers themselves were not. Anyone interested in computer programming and what makes a great computer programmer will enjoy this book.” —Dave Walden, original member of the BBN ARPANET team
“These are wonderful interviews and this looks to be a bible for any programmer who aspires to be better.” —Peter Christensen, Founder of GeekStack.com
“This book is dead sexy. When it comes out, you should definitely get a copy.” —Joseph F. Miklojcik III from review at jfm3> _
“Superb book!” —Prakash Swaminathan from review at CloudKnow
“Read it, because then you will know the greatest coding brains.” —Amit Shaw from review at Teleported Bits
“One of the other core questions Peter asks is, what books would you recommend to help a developer learn programming? For me, this book joins my short list—it takes you away from the limitations of learning within a single company or community, and shows you the breadth of experiences that can make someone a great developer.” —Marc Hedlund from review at O’Reilly Radar
“The range of topics covered is just astounding.” —Chris Hartjes from review at @TheKeyboard
Joshua Bloch
Now Chief Java Architect at Google, Bloch previously was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he led the design and implementation of the Java Collections Framework introduced in Java 2 and was involved in the design of several language additions in the Java 5 release. He has a BS from Columbia University and a PhD from Carnegie-Mellon University, where he worked on the Camelot distributed transaction processing system, which later became Encina, a product of Transarc, where he was a Senior Systems Designer. He wrote the 2001 Jolt Award–winning book Effective Java and coauthored Java Puzzlers and Java Concurrency in Practice.
As you might expect from someone whose job is to encourage the use of Java at Google, Bloch is a strong advocate of the language. Despite the recent flurry of interest in approaches to concurrency such as Software Transactional Memory or Erlang’s message passing, Bloch thinks Java has “the best approach of any language out there” to concurrency and predicts a resurgence of interest in Java as more and more programmers are forced to deal with programming for machines with multicore CPUs.
Bloch is also a strong advocate of treating programming as API design, and we talked about how that affects his own design process, as well as whether Java has gotten too complex and why picking a programming language is like picking a bar.