8 Best Java Books for Experienced Developers in 2024
My favorite Java books and course to learn about writing high-performance Java applications, JVM Internals, Garbage Collection, and Performance tuning
Hello folks, You might be thinking, why should a Java developer read a book on Performance tuning? When I first faced this question a long time back, I thought I will do it later, but I never got back to that for a long time.
I realized my mistake of having a lack of knowledge on memory measurement, JVM tuning, and finding bottlenecks only when I faced severe performance and scalability issues on our mission-critical, server-side financial application written in Java.
It’s true that when you really need it, you learn most, but those times are not the best time to learn fundamentals, in fact, those times are to apply and correct your misunderstanding.
This is why I am sharing these Java performance books with all Java programmers and suggesting they take some time and go through at least one book in full.
By the way, these books are in addition to my 5 must-read books for Java programmers, which deal with all other topics in Java. If you haven’t read them yet, make sure you check them as well.
Remember, knowledge of Performance tuning is also one of the essential aspects of experienced Java developers and can separate you from the crowd.
Ever since Java was introduced, almost 25 years back, it has faced criticism for being slow and lacking performance. Today, I don’t think Java is anywhere behind in terms of performance to native languages like C or C++.
Given Java’s ability to natively compile hot code using JIT (Just in time Compiler), it is almost on par with native applications written in C and C++, but a lot can be done by following best practices, avoiding common performance pitfalls, and using latest tools and techniques.
In this article, I am going to introduce five + one (bonus) books on Java performance, which will not only teach you what to measure, how to measure but also explains the fundamentals and concept behind those issues.
You will not only learn about the Operating System and JVM on which your Java application run but also how to write faster coding using Java API. So what are we waiting for, let’s begin our journey to a land of great books on Java performance tuning?
Btw, if you are in hurry and need a course, you can also check out Java Multithreading, Concurrency & Performance Optimization course on Udemy to learn some practical tips to write high-performance concurrency Java applications.
Top 8 Java Performance Tuning Books To Read in 2024
Here is my list of some of the best books to learn the art of Java and JVM Performance tuning to learn about JVM internals, Garbage collection tuning, JVM parameters, profiling, and monitoring Java application and debugging it to find nasty bugs.
1. Optimizing Java by Benjamin J Evans
The Optimizing Java: Practical Techniques for Improving JVM Application Performance 1st Edition
by Benjamin J Evans, James Gough, and Chris Newland is one of the best books to understand how Garbage collection and JVM works internally.
I originally missed this book on the list because I haven’t read it until Ben suggested it in the comments, but just reading a couple of pages, I was convinced that this book deserves mention in this list.
Many books focus mainly on G.C., but this one describes many more aspects of JVM internals like threading, JVM internal memory representation, bytecode, JIT compilers, etc. Moreover, the book contains an overview of many useful tools that can help you on a daily basis work with JVM.
This book is also much more approachable in this list than some specialized books like The Garbage collection handbook, which is excellent for people who want to learn G.C. algorithms in-depth but may not be needed for most of the developers.
If you need some help and want to see things, in reality, I also suggest you check out the Java Application Performance and Memory Management course by Matt Greecroft and Virtual Programmers. It’s a wonderful course to learn how to analyze heap dump, improve Java performance, understand GC logs, and solve memory leaks. I highly recommend it.
2. High-Performance Java Persistence by Vlad Mihalcea
This is an excellent book on Hibernate and goes really deep into performance. If you want to learn how to squeeze the last performance drop out of your data access layer, you must read the High-Performance Java Persistence book.
The author of the book, Vlad Mihalcea, is a Hibernate Developer Advocate working for Red Hat and also a known authority in Hibernate, Java, and JPA technology.
The book starts by explaining JDBC and Database essentials,. ResultSet caching, Statement Caching, creating and maintaining database connection pool, transaction and isolation level, and performance implication of them before moving to ORM, Hibernate, and JPA.
It covers many advanced Hibernate topics like Inheritance, Relationship, Caching, Flushing, Batching, and Concurrency control, which makes things books sometimes hard to read, but don’t worry.
Vlad has also created an online course, High-Performance Java persistence with Hibernate, where it explains those concepts with more examples. The course is a perfect companion for this book for anyone who wants to improve Hibernate’s performance for their application.
In short, this book nicely summarizes the challenges and performance implications of using JDBC, either directly or via JPA and Hibernate. If you are working on a Java application that uses JDBC or Hibernate, and you are dealing with performance issues, this is one of the must-read books for you.
Vlad is also offering a10% discount on his eBook, use coupon code JAVINPAULDISCOUNT to get a 10% discount on this book on his Teachable site.
3. Java Performance The Definitive Guide By Scott Oaks
In order to learn performance tuning, you should know the tools, processes, options, and, most importantly avoiding common performance pitfalls. This book scores well on this point, it has a chapter introducing all the tools, a Java performance engineer should be aware of, including advanced tools like Flight Recorder and Java Mission Control.
It also has excellent chapters on explaining various garbage collection algorithms e.g., Concurrent Mark Sweep (CMS) and G1 Garbage collector.
You will learn how each of them works in different conditions, how to monitor them, and how to tune them. It also includes a full chapter on heap analysis and optimization.
In short, This is one of the best books on Java Performance Tuning, but, If you like online courses, then you can combine this one with Pluralsight’s Understanding the Java Virtual Machine: Memory Management course to get the best of both worlds.
This will teach you everyday things like how to take heap dumps and histograms in Java, and then introduces many ways to decrease your heap memory footprint.
It also has a chapter on JDBC and JPA performance. The critical point it teaches you that how choosing the proper JDBC / JPA methods may far outweigh the gains from the SQL queries tuning.
Similarly, it has a complete chapter explaining multi-threading issues, pitfalls, and impact on performance. It includes advanced topics like ForkJoinPool and Java 8 Streams.
It also touches base on the cost of synchronization and false sharing, tuning JVM threads e.g., thread stack size, configure biased locking, thread priorities, and thread spinning.
By the way, the best is yet to be introduced, what I like most about this book is Chapter 12. This chapter presents some excellent core Java tuning tips and their impact.
This includes buffered I/O, class loading, random number generation, JNI, exceptions, String performance, logging, Java Collections API, Java 8 lambdas vs. anonymous classes, and finally, Java 8 stream and multiple filter performance.
This was actually the first chapter I read, and I fall in love with its content and style. If you like to quickly gauge the book by yourself, I suggest starting with this chapter. It also touches base on Java EE performance, explaining possible issues with XML and JSON parsing, and object serialization.
And, if you need more resources, you can also check out Java Multithreading, Concurrency & Performance Optimization course on Udemy to learn some practical tips to write high performance concurrency Java application.
4. Java Performance Companion by Charlie Hunt
This is one of the most up-to-date books on Java Performance tuning and writing code which executes faster in Java.
This was the book that told me that the performance of Java applications will be limited by three main factors CPU, Memory, and IO (both Disk and Network), and surprisingly many developers who know how to use profiler don’t know this basic fact.
Though this book also introduces many profiling tools, I suggest the latest books like Java Performance The Definitive Guide By Scott Oaks and Java Performance By Binu John, Charlie Hunt has a more comprehensive list.
And, If you need a course, you can also combine this book with the Java Memory Management course on Udemy.
5. Java Performance By Binu John
This was my favorite Java performance book for a long time, until recently when I read Java Performance The Definitive Guide By Scott Oaks. This book is very much similar to the one which replaced it from the top.
It has chapters explaining how to take measurements of performance, demonstrating tools necessary to measure CPU, Memory, and IO. Chapters on explaining How Garbage collection works, different GC algorithms like Serial vs. Parallel Garbage collectors, Concurrent Mark Sweep collectors, etc.
Both Binu John and Charlie Hunt have done an excellent job on how to construct experiments that identify opportunities for optimization, interpret the results, and take effective action.
To give you some credibility and hint at what you can expect in this book, Charlie Hunt is the JVM performance lead engineer at Oracle. He is responsible for improving the performance of the HotSpot JVM and Java SE class libraries. He has also been involved in improving the performance of the Oracle GlassFish and Oracle WebLogic Server.
While, Binu John is a senior performance engineer at Ning, Inc., where he focuses on improving the performance and Scalability of the Ning platform to support millions of page views per month.
Before that, he spent more than a decade working on Java-related performance issues at Sun Microsystems, where he served on Sun’s Enterprise Java Performance team.
If you haven’t read any book on Java performance tuning and want to build a good foundation for dealing with performance problems, this is the book to buy. It’s worth every single penny spent.
6. System Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud By Brendan Gregg
Systems performance analysis is an essential skill for all computer users, whether you’re trying to understand why your laptop is slow or optimizing the performance of a large-scale production environment.
It is the study of both operating Systems (kernel) and application performance, and this book will tell you all you need to know about Linux performance monitoring and tuning.
The programmer starts with optimizing algorithms, data structure, JVM, Garbage collectors, but they eventually reach a point where System performances come into play.
You may want to know why disk operations were so quick on your development box, but became a significant issue on the production box, how CPU caching effect so much to your application, how can you leverage L1, L2, and L3 Cache, and Physical memory available on your machine.
In my opinion, this is the book for every programmer and not just for Java programmers. Knowing how your system work, how paging, swapping, and virtual memory work, how CPU gets data from disk, how different kind of disk can make a profound impact on IO-bound Java applications is significant for any developer who is genuinely interested in performance tuning.
I had often said, learn JVM, but I can now tell you must know your System well. Knowing operating system basics, system calls, memory, CPU, network, and disk IO, caches will undoubtedly go a long way and help you to write a high-performance application in any programming language, including Java.
7. Java Performance and Scalability: A Quantitative Approach by Henry H. Liu
Before Introducing the book, let me introduce the author, he is a Ph.D., works at Vmware, and specialized in writing high-performance and scalable enterprise Java applications, but I think he is more known for his work on Software Performance and Scalability: A Quantitative Approach.
You can see this book a more specialized version of his earlier bestseller. As the name suggests, this book is focused on the performance and Scalability of Java applications.
This book is suitable for Java developers, architects, and even managers. It is divided into two main parts, the first part deals with the basics of Java performance and Scalability, and the second part presents practices to improve performance and Scalability.
The basics part contains four chapters; each of them separately explores the Scalability of software programs, computer hardware, and Java Virtual Machine.
The second part includes chapters exploring how going from 32-bit to 64-bit affects the performance and Scalability of Java applications.
Chapter 6 is probably the most important chapter, which explains how to tune Java for the best possible performance and Scalability. It introduces methodologies, practices, tools, and tuning Java applications keeping Scalability in mind.
Chapter 7 is another essential chapter that explains how design, algorithms, and implementations affect the performance and Scalability of any Java application. It also covers how to perform a bottleneck analysis. The good thing is that he explains all this with sample programs, so you can follow guidelines while reading.
Overall it's an excellent and unique book for Java performance engineers, and if you love to read multiple books to gain insights, this is the one you can read along with Java Performance The Definitive Guide and System Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud.
8. The Well-Grounded Java Developer
This is the bonus book for my readers, I won’t say this book only focuses on Java performance tuning, but I would say this is the book every modern Java developer should have on his shelf. Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg don’t need any introduction.
They are well-known Java experts and founders of jClarity, which promises to solve performance problems in cloud environments. They have many years of experience in Java, which reflects in their book The Well-Grounded Java Developer: Vital techniques of Java 7 and polyglot programming.
This is the must-have book for modern-day Java developers. It explains new changes in Java, including those in JDK 7 like try-with-resources, NIO2.0, and concurrency changes, but most importantly, It explains why it is so expensive to add new features to the JVM.
Adding new library extensions such as fork/join or syntactic sugar like switch-on-string is relatively easy, but adding a JVM instruction like invokedynamic is very costly.
Probably the best thing about this book is that it doesn’t stop at Java and go one step further to introduce modern-day JVM languages like Scala, Clojure, and Groovy.
It touches on functional programming with new JVM languages and modern approaches to test, build, and contentious integration of Java applications.
That’s all on this list of best Java performance tuning books. I have recommended Effective Java a lot of times, and as one must-have book for Java developers, but at the same time I have also found that you should have a publication dedicated to Java Performance Tuning.
After some years of work and experience in Java, you are bound to face performance challenges, and at this time, you should, at least, know the fundamentals, tools, and processes of finding the bottleneck and improving the performance of Java applications.
So, if you haven’t read any Java performance book, this is the time to read one.
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Thanks, for reading this article so far. If you like these best Java performance books and courses then please share them with your friends and colleagues. If you have any questions or feedback then please drop a note.
P. S. — If you are new to the Java Programming world and want to learn Java in a guided and more structured way then you can also check out The Complete Java Masterclass course by Tim Buchalka and his team on Udemy. It’s a great course and recently updated for Java SE 17 to learn Java online.
