Michael Bolin's 6.170 Recitation

www.bolinfest.com 
This web site is for students in the recitation that I am teaching for 6.170 Fall 2004. The recitation meets Thursday afternoons from 2-3pm in 34-302 and my office hours are after recitation from 3-5pm in 32-044A.
Recitation Notes
9/16 Recitation 2
9/23 Recitation 3
10/7 Recitation 5
10/14 Recitation 6
10/28 Recitation 8
Recommended Readings
Athena Pocket Reference
The Java IAQ
Programming by Coincidence
Writing a Code Generator
in Java
The Story of Mel
A Comparative Overview of C#
Beating the Averages
J2SE 5.0 New Features

The Java IAQ: Infrequently Answered Questions

http://www.norvig.com/java-iaq.html

In The Java IAQ, Peter Norvig discusses a number of subtle issues in Java. For those of you coming from a C++ background, this may answer some of your "Why doesn't Java do X?" questions. The information covered here contains both topics for Java newbies as well as experts.

The two issues I would raise with this reading are:

  1. As Norvig admits, his profiling data was taken in 1998, and Java has improved considerably since that time, so you may want to recalculate these numbers for yourself.
  2. Effective Java should be listed among the Java books that Norvig lists as Excellent. Moreover, the books that Norvig currently lists as Excellent are being sold for less than a dollar on Amazon whereas the lowest price you can find there for Effective Java is still $20.

For those of you interested in other programming languages, note that Norvig also has a Python IAQ as well as some general essays on Lisp, Scheme, Python, and Java that are linked from his home page.



©2004 Michael Bolinwww.bolinfest.com