Better, Faster, Lighter Java I’ve just finished reading this book by Bruce Tate and Justin Gehtland. Its one of the best books I’ve read for a long time and I thoroughly recommend it. The book begins by explaining how Java development has gotten too complex and how often too many “bloated” frameworks are used for solving enterprise Java problems. The authors describe how simplicity is often the best approach to writing applications (quote: “simplicity is the hallmark of a well written application”). There then follow 5 idioms for writing better code with a chapter describing each of these in detail. Next there is a chapter each on the Spring Framework and on Hibernate showing how these 5 idioms have successfully been applied to these popular frameworks and giving an overview of how they can be used. Finally, there are a couple of chapters bringing all this new knowledge together and showing some example code. I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone doing Enterprise J2EE ...