Java Programming Mastery

Three decades on, Java still runs the enterprise. This book is about being genuinely good at it.

Most Java books give you a syntax tour. Java Programming Mastery moves deliberately from first principles to production judgement — the kind of understanding that separates someone who can write Java from someone trusted to design systems in it.

Fully updated for Java SE 25 LTS and Spring Boot 4, the second edition works through twenty chapters:

• Foundations — the JVM and compilation pipeline, Java fundamentals, and what's actually new through Java 25 LTS
• Object-oriented programming — core concepts and then the advanced material: sealed types, records, pattern matching, and the design decisions behind them
• Collections and generics — the full Collections Framework including sequenced collections, plus generics, bounded types, wildcards, and type erasure
• Exceptions, lambdas, and streams — error-handling strategy, functional idioms, and the Streams API in depth
• Concurrency — fundamentals through advanced work: the memory model, executors, virtual threads, and structured concurrency
• JVM internals and performance — garbage collection, memory layout, profiling, and monitoring
• Design patterns, I/O and the file system, networking and the HTTP client, annotations and reflection, and the module system
• Testing — JUnit, mocking, and what a genuinely useful test suite looks like
• Spring Boot — fundamentals and REST API development
• Algorithmic problem solving and system design principles — the two chapters that matter most in senior interviews and in real architectural work

Every chapter opens with the topics it covers and closes with a summary. Examples are complete and runnable, not fragments.

Written for developers who already know some Java and want depth, for students moving from coursework to production code, and for technical leads who need a common reference for their team.

Covers Java SE 25 LTS and Spring Boot 4