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Comment by dbsmith83 | Hacker News Reader

Idk about GP, but one book I highly recommend is Java Concurrency in Practice - https://www.amazon.com/Java-Concurrency-Practice-Brian-Goetz...

It's old, but the material holds up well since it covers a lot of fundamentals

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We were an all-Java shop and we were considering how to make our application a SAAS cloud application. Our senior engineers read this book. They all agreed that it was very educational, but the conclusion was that Java concurrency in practice has too many footguns, and so we ended up adopting Clojure.

I think modern Java has better support for it, but if you've got mutable state spread throughout your application you're going to have a hard time no matter what.

> senior engineers read this book

How does one become a senior engineer if you don't understand concurrency?

Mutable state is most easily solved by having cpoies of everything, but then that's a tradeoff between performance and infrastructure/resource costs, but I guess that if you're in an all-Java shop that isn't much of an issue.

Reading a book on the basics doesn't mean you don't have a grasp of them. I'd argue that refreshing your knowledge on things is a mark of a good engineer, regardless of seniority.

Rich Hickey is supposed to have said that he created Clojure because he was tired of telling people to read that book.

Best I can find as a source for now is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y5Pv4yN0b0 -- I thought there was a link somewhere to Hickey himself saying this, but can't find it.

I have the book. I've tried reading it several times. I just can't get into it. My major complaint is that it gives a ton of code examples and then "don't do this" is written under it. So one has to be extremely alert at all times while reading through the book. It dives right into the subject as if one has already been writing threaded code. Perhaps that's the target audience.

I also recommend it, a little bit old because it doesn't cover new features but the fundamentals are strong, Brian Goetz really did a great job.

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