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Comment by davidtgoldblatt | Hacker News Reader

For those interested in additional technical details of high-performance garbage collection, the book cited (The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management) is a fantastic reference. It's one of the best-written technical books I own, and distills much of the modern literature. If you need to do GC performance tuning or reason about memory management issues in the JVM, having this book around will be very useful.

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My apologies for going off topic for a second, but is it well-known that Amazon seems to use Uber-esque surge pricing?! I (like apparently a lot of people) went to Amazon to buy the book cited as soon as I saw it (and it looks like a great book!). There were eight copies left in stock, and I bought it for $62.69.[1] When I went back to Amazon a few minutes later (following someone else's link), there was only one copy left in stock, and it was listed for $98.60.[2] With my apologies again for being off-topic, is this a known phenomenon?

Anyway, thanks for seconding their recommendation of the book; I'm looking forward to reading it -- and glad I saved the 35 clams!

[1] https://www.evernote.com/shard/s249/sh/53d7b93a-d737-41c4-8e...

[2] https://www.evernote.com/shard/s249/sh/a1c55244-d64e-40cc-a6...

As another poster said, these aren't 100% identical books, but you can see that for exactly the same book, too, if two booksellers that sell through the Amazon web site have bots that try to outsmart each other. For an extreme example, see http://news.discovery.com/tech/amazon-lists-books-for-23-mil...

Crap -- I'm an idiot. (Though at least the one I purchased is the right one.) If I could only downvote myself, I would...

Yes, prices frequently fluctuate on many products. Luckily, there are a few sites that provide historical info and alerts. e.g.

http://camelcamelcamel.com/The-Garbage-Collection-Handbook-M...

Check again later, and you may see the price go back down (or up higher). There are third-party price history trackers for Amazon as well that let you see the volatility of prices for specific items over time.

Those are two different books you've linked to...

Garbage Collection: Algorithms for Automatic Dynamic Memory Management is the original book, whereas The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management is the new and updated version. I have the original, but it would be nice to know everything the new book adds.

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