A report from the field...

... or "You had a whole SECOND to reply? In MY day..."

First: if you are not a 'hardcore' Java programmer: do not bother with the rest of this review, and do not buy this book until you reach that point. It won't help enough to offset the damage it causes.

That said, a bit of context: the project I was working on that inspired me to buy a copy of this book involved a telecom system that had to handle hundreds of transactions a second, with sub-second response times (yes, in Java). Not the biggest system, or the fastest, but definitely not "fancy GUI code", by any stretch of the imagination.

Don't buy this book to learn how to use an optimizer; it isn't a beginner's guide. After buying it, I only ended up using perhaps two of the items covered in the book, while working on the project. But those two points were things that the several hundred collective years of development experience on the project had missed, and every other topic in the book warranted at least the question "did we check for this?"

It is difficult to categorize the audience of this book; it is in the odd position of needing to be far too heavy on theory and detailed explanation to be a "cookbook", for it to be of any use, but it also has to cover topics so diverse that it is unlikely that more than a handful will ever apply to any single situation, so it isn't really a "how to" book, either.

So why did I give this book four stars? Because a different set of points in the book applied on the next project I had to work on. But those 4 stars with a warning: for the audience and topics that it covers, this book it is *very* good, and for anything or anyone else, it will be, at best, nonsense; at worst, using it can be actively counterproductive (as another reviewer noted, several of the things the author covers are not for the faint of heart, and for very good reasonss).

It failed to earn five stars for two reasons: first, while the author has a clear grasp of his material, his grasp of the audience seems to be hazy at times. Like the marketing of the book itself, he seems to have trouble deciding whether his audience is experts looking for that one golden tweak, or novices (who, in this case, should look for a more introductory book on profiling and optimization in general, or the tools they have available, in specific).

The second reason is not a problem with the material itself, just the passage of time - this edition predates the release of the Tiger version (of Java, not Mac OS X), and thus does not cover it. However, anyone attempting to use this book to work with Tiger should, in my opinion, strongly reconsider doing so; while the fundamentals of how to do the analysis remain the same, the details of several of the issues the author discusses are *completely* changed in Tiger.

Other Reviews

• Outdated
• Good book on performance
• Ups and Downs, but generally down
• Authoritative and practical, but not for everyone
• A report from the field...