I have a new article up on O'Reilly's ONJava site. In it, I describe my favorite API (as opposed to language) features of Java 5.0. Not necessarily the ones that are most important or most useful, but the features that I think are coolest or most elegant. These include the Callable and Future interfaces of java.util.concurrent, and also java.util.regex.MatchResult. I've blogged about all of them here.
If you read the article all the way to the end, I also talk about a new language feature that I list as a favorite simply because it is utterly obscure.
Hi David,
I bought your TIGER intro book. I'm wondering if your nutshell book also makes sense (BigDecimal -- do you cover stuff on it ?). I've been doing java for 5 years now(mostly server side).
thank you,
BR,
~A
Java 1.5 Tiger: A Developer's Notebook has my name on the cover, but Brett McLaughlin was the primary author. I was really more of a consultant for it than an author. The writing style and overall approach is really quite different than in Java in a Nutshell.
Java in a Nutshell is a more comprehensive overview of the entire language, plus a long API quickref. There is only one chapter in Java in a Nutshell on Java 5.0 language features, but they're covered in more technical depth.
I do have a short example of BigDecimal in Chapter 5, along with many, many other examples of the core APIs.