I first started doing Java back in 1995. That’s quite a long time ago. Once I got going, I wrote Java code every single day, for thirteen years. I co-authored a Java book, gave talks on Java and was an all-around, Java Guy™. And sometime around 2006, I got bored with it. Completely and totally bored. I was a one-man shop at a small company, my code was running just-fine-thanks-very-much, and I didn’t feel like doing anything new with it, at all. I was more interested in Ruby and, to a lesser degree, Rails, so Java changes didn’t really interest me. And thus, I failed to notice some really cool stuff that was going on in Java-land.

In June of this year I joined a new company that is doing some rather advanced Java work. I had to get current, tout de suite, and in so doing, I’ve really gotten interested and engaged again. Spring and Hibernate have really changed from the older versions I was using, and so has JUnit. All for the better, from what I can tell.

And with this renewed interest, I’ve bought my first new Java books in over 3 years. I bought Effective Java (2nd Edition) to replace my first edition and Java Concurrency in Practice, because I heard good things about it. So far, I’ve read about 2/3 of  Effective Java. I used to buy Java books all the time. I have tons of them. But when I got bored, I stopped shelling out the cash on the Java books.

Java-land is still a very nice place to play. Sometimes you have to get an outside perspective to realize that.