Serious developers know that code can always be improved. With each iteration, you make optimizations—small and large—that can have a huge impact on your application’s speed, size, resilience, and maintainability. In Seriously Good Software: Code that Works, Survives, and Wins, author, teacher, and Java expert Marco Faella teaches you techniques for writing better code. You’ll start with a simple application and follow it through seven careful refactorings, each designed to explore another dimension of quality.

Part 1: Preliminaries

1 Software qualities and problem statement

1.1 Mostly external software qualities

1.1.1 Correctness

1.1.2 Robustness

1.1.3 Usability

1.1.4 Efficiency

1.2 Mostly internal software qualities

1.2.1 Readability

1.2.2 Reusability

1.2.3 Testability

1.2.4 Maintainability

1.3 Interactions between software qualities

1.4 Special qualities

1.4.1 Thread safety

1.4.2 Succinctness

1.5 Structure of the book

1.6 Specifications for a system of water containers

1.6.1 The API

1.6.2 The use case

1.7 Data model and representations

1.7.1 Storing water amounts

1.7.2 Storing connections

1.8 Hello containers! Novice

1.8.1 Fields and constructor

1.8.2 Methods `getAmount` and `addWater`

1.8.3 Method `connectTo`

1.9 Further reading

2 Reference implementation

2.1 The code `Reference`

2.1.1 Memory layout diagrams

2.1.2 The methods

2.2 Memory requirements

2.3 Time complexity

2.3.1 Time complexity of Reference

2.4 Summary

2.5 Applying what you learned

2.5.1 Exercise 1

2.5.2 Exercise 2

2.5.3 Exercise 3 (mini-project)

2.6 Answers to quizzes and exercises

2.6.1 Pop quiz 1

2.6.2 Pop quiz 2

2.6.3 Pop quiz 3

2.6.4 Pop quiz 4

2.6.5 Exercise 1

2.6.6 Exercise 2

2.6.7 Exercise 3

2.7 Further reading

Part 2: Software qualities

3 Need for speed: Time efficiency

3.1 Adding water in constant time `[Speed 1]`

3.1.1 Time complexity

3.2 Adding connections in constant time `[Speed 2]`

3.2.1 Representing groups as circular lists

3.2.2 Delaying the updates

3.3 The best balance: union-find algorithms `[Speed 3]`

3.3.1 Finding the group representative

3.3.2 Connecting trees of containers

3.3.3 Worst-case time complexity

3.3.4 Amortized time complexity

3.3.5 Amortized analysis of resizable arrays

3.4 Comparing implementations

3.4.1 Experiments

3.4.2 Theory vs practice

3.5 And now for something completely different

3.5.1 Fast insertion

3.5.2 Fast queries

3.5.3 Fast everything

3.6 Real-world use cases

3.7 Summary

3.8 Applying what you learned

3.8.1 Exercise 1

3.8.2 Exercise 2

3.8.3 Exercise 3 (mini-project)

3.8.4 Exercise 4

3.9 Answers to quizzes and exercises

3.9.1 Pop quiz 1

3.9.2 Pop quiz 2

3.9.3 Pop quiz 3

3.9.4 Pop quiz 4

3.9.5 Exercise 1

3.9.6 Exercise 2

3.9.7 Exercise 3

3.9.8 Exercise 4

3.10 Further reading

4 Precious memory: Space efficiency

4.1 Gently squeezing `Memory 1`

4.1.1 Space and time complexity

4.2 Plain arrays

4.2.1 Space and time complexity

4.3 Forgoing objects

4.3.1 The object-less API

4.3.2 Fields and `getAmount` method

4.3.3 Creating containers with a factory method

4.3.4 Connecting containers by ID

4.3.5 Space and time complexity

4.4 The black hole `Memory 4`

4.4.1 Space and time complexity

4.5 Space-time trade-offs

4.6 And now for something completely different

4.6.1 Low duplicate count

4.6.2 High duplicate count

4.7 Real-world use cases

4.8 Summary

4.9 Applying what you learned

4.9.1 Exercise 1

4.9.2 Exercise 2

4.9.3 Exercise 3

4.9.4 Exercise 4 (mini-project)

4.10 Answers to quizzes and exercises

4.10.1 Pop quiz 1

4.10.2 Pop quiz 2

4.10.3 Pop quiz 3

4.10.4 Pop quiz 4

4.10.5 Pop quiz 5

4.10.6 Exercise 1

4.10.7 Exercise 2

4.10.8 Exercise 3

4.10.9 Exercise 4

4.11 Further reading

5 Self-conscious code: Reliability through monitoring

5.1 Design by contract

5.1.1 Pre- and post-conditions

5.1.2 Invariants

5.1.3 Correctness and robustness

5.1.4 Checking contracts

5.1.5 The broader picture

5.2 Designing containers by contract

5.3 Containers that check their contracts `Contracts`

5.3.1 Checking the contract of `addWater`

5.3.2 Checking the contract of connectTo

5.4 Containers that check their invariants `Invariants`

5.4.1 Checking the invariants in `connectTo`

5.4.2 Checking the invariants in `addWater`

5.5 And now for something completely different

5.5.1 The contracts

5.5.2 A baseline implementation

5.5.3 Checking the contracts

5.5.4 Checking the invariants

5.6 Real-world use cases

5.7 Summary

5.8 Applying what you learned

5.8.1 Exercise 1

5.8.2 Exercise 2

5.8.3 Exercise 3

5.8.4 Exercise 4

5.9 Answers to quizzes and exercises

5.9.1 Pop quiz 1

5.9.2 Pop quiz 2

5.9.3 Pop quiz 3

5.9.4 Pop quiz 4

5.9.5 Pop quiz 5

5.9.6 Exercise 1

5.9.7 Exercise 2

5.9.8 Exercise 3

5.9.9 Exercise 4

5.10 Further reading

6 Lie to me: Reliability through testing

6.1 Basic testing notions

6.1.1 Coverage in testing

6.1.2 Testing and design-by-contract

6.1.3 JUnit

6.2 Testing containers UnitTests

6.2.1 Initializing the tests

6.2.2 Testing `addWater`

6.2.3 Testing `connectTo`

6.2.4 Running the tests

6.2.5 Measuring code coverage

6.3 Testability `Testable`

6.3.1 Controllability

6.3.2 Observability

6.3.3 Isolation: severing dependencies

6.4 And now for something completely different

6.4.1 Improving testability

6.4.2 A test suite

6.5 Real-world use cases

6.6 Summary

6.7 Applying what you learned

6.7.1 Exercise 1

6.7.2 Exercise 2

6.7.3 Exercise 3

6.7.4 Exercise 4

6.8 Answers to quizzes and exercises

6.8.1 Pop quiz 1

6.8.2 Pop quiz 2

6.8.3 Pop quiz 3

6.8.4 Pop quiz 4

6.8.5 Pop quiz 5

6.8.6 Pop quiz 6

6.8.7 Exercise 1

6.8.8 Exercise 2

6.8.9 Exercise 3

6.8.10 Exercise 4

6.9 Further reading

7 Coding aloud: Readability

7.1 Points of view on readability

7.1.1 Corporate coding style guides

7.1.2 Readability ingredients

7.2 Structural readability features

7.2.1 Control flow statements

7.2.2 Expressions and local variables

7.3 Exterior readability features

7.3.1 Comments

7.3.2 Naming things

7.3.3 Whitespace and indentation

7.4 Readable containers `Readable`

7.4.1 Documenting the class header with Javadoc

7.4.2 Cleaning `connectTo`

7.4.3 Cleaning `addWater`

7.5 Final thoughts on readability

7.6 And now for something completely different

7.7 Real-world use cases

7.8 Summary

7.9 Applying what you learned

7.9.1 Exercise 1

7.9.2 Exercise 2

7.9.3 Exercise 3

7.9.4 Exercise 4

7.10 Answers to quizzes and exercises

7.10.1 Pop quiz 1

7.10.2 Pop quiz 2

7.10.3 Pop quiz 3

7.10.4 Pop quiz 4

7.10.5 Pop quiz 5

7.10.6 Exercise 1

7.10.7 Exercise 2

7.10.8 Exercise 3

7.10.9 Exercise 4

7.11 Further reading

8 Many cooks in the kitchen: Thread safety

8.1 Challenges to thread safety

8.1.1 Levels of concurrency

8.1.2 A concurrency policy for water containers

8.2 Dealing with deadlocks

8.2.1 Atomic lock sequences

8.2.2 Ordered lock sequences

8.2.3 A hidden race condition

8.3 Thread-safe containers `ThreadSafe`

8.3.1 Synchronizing `connectTo`

8.3.2 Synchronizing `addWater` and `getAmount`

8.4 Immutability `Immutable`

8.4.1 The API

8.4.2 The implementation

8.5 And now for something completely different

8.6 Real-world use cases

8.7 Summary

8.8 Applying what you learned

8.8.1 Exercise 1

8.8.2 Exercise 2

8.8.3 Exercise 3

8.8.4 Exercise 4

8.9 Answers to quizzes and exercises

8.9.1 Pop quiz 1

8.9.2 Pop quiz 2

8.9.3 Pop quiz 3

8.9.4 Pop quiz 4

8.9.5 Pop quiz 5

8.9.6 Exercise 1

8.9.7 Exercise 2

8.9.8 Exercise 3

8.9.9 Exercise 4

8.10 Further reading

9 Please recycle: Reusability

9.1 Establishing boundaries

9.2 The general framework

9.2.1 The attribute API

9.2.2 Mutable collectors

9.2.3 Adapting Attribute to functional interfaces

9.3 A generic container implementation

9.4 General considerations

9.5 Recovering water containers Generic

9.5.1 Updated use case

9.5.2 Designing the concrete attribute

9.5.3 Defining the concrete water container class

9.6 Social network posts

9.7 And now for something completely different

9.7.1 An interface for parametric functions

9.7.2 A communication discipline

9.8 Real-world use cases

9.9 Summary

9.10 Applying what you learned

9.10.1 Exercise 1

9.10.2 Exercise 2

9.10.3 Exercise 3

9.10.4 Exercise 4

9.11 Answers to quizzes and exercises

9.11.1 Pop quiz 1

9.11.2 Pop quiz 2

9.11.3 Pop quiz 3

9.11.4 Pop quiz 4

9.11.5 Exercise 1

9.11.6 Exercise 2

9.11.7 Exercise 3

9.11.8 Exercise 4

9.12 Further reading

Appendixes

Appendix A: Code golf: Succinctness

A.1 The shortest I came up with Golfing

A.2 Further reading

About the Technology

Great code blends the skill of a programmer with the time-tested techniques and best practices embraced by the entire development community. Although each application has its own context and character, some dimensions of quality are always important. This book concentrates on eight pillars of seriously good software: speed, memory usage, reliability, readability, thread safety, generality, and elegance. The Java-based examples demonstrate techniques that apply to any OO language.

About the book

Seriously Good Software takes you on a journey through software development best practices as you develop a simple inefficient implementation into a robust, professional-quality application. The deceptively-simple problem—balancing water levels in multiple connected containers—presents some interesting complexities as you optimize the code for speed, efficiency, and durability. Author Marco Faella’s passion for teaching shines bright as you learn to assess performance and write thread-safe code that’s easily readable, testable, and maintainable. Along the way, you’ll gain a keen sense of the trade-offs inherent to every programming task, no matter how simple.

Each chapter contains hands-on exercises with complete, clear solutions that relate the techniques to real-world applications. Occasional pop quizzes ensure you’ve got a firm grasp on the concepts as you go along. When you’re done with this book, evaluating software qualities, considering tradeoffs and operational constraints, and asking all the right questions will be a reflex!

What's inside

Evaluating software qualities
Distinguishing between qualities that are internal, external, functional, and non-functional
Assessing tradeoffs and interactions between software qualities
Fulfilling different quality objectives for a single unifying task
Hands-on exercises and detailed solutions
Exercises covering the inner workings of the Java API

About the reader

For developers with basic object-oriented programming skills and intermediate Java skills.

About the author

Marco Faella has been teaching an advanced programming language course for twelve years as an associate professor at a major Italian university. As passionate about programming as he is about teaching, Marco has published many research articles in peer-reviewed journals, a Java certification manual, and a Java programming video course.

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