Do One Thing and Do it Well

I read most of the book Better, faster, lighter Java by Bruce A. Tate, Justin Gehtland and although I didn't find the book as a whole that useful, some chapters did make some very good points.

here is the description of the book on the oreilly site

"In Better, Faster, Lighter Java, authors Bruce Tate and Justin Gehtland argue that the old heavyweight architectures, such as WebLogic, JBoss, and WebSphere, are unwieldy, complicated, and contribute to slow and buggy application code. As an alternative, the authors present two "lightweight" open source architectures, Hibernate and Spring, that can help you create enterprise applications that are easier to maintain, write, and debug, and are ultimately much faster."

Fortunatly one of the chapters I found most interesting was chapter three, do one thing and do it well, which is a free pdf.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/bfljava/chapter/ch03.pdf

The chapter offers a good method of tackling problems and talks you through a couple of problems he tackled. He has the steps of first spliting up the problem into smaller bite sized chunks and uses the quote

"how do you eat an elephant, one bite at a time"

I liked his talk about the different layers of a web application and the common layers. He talks about one of my favourite topics "interfaces". The chapter also talks about refactoring which is a problem every developer faces and looking after someone elses code can be a tricky process. He talks about refactoring to reduce coupling.

I found this chapter very useful but the rest of the book I didn't find that useful and seemed a bit rushed or it didn't really seem to say that much (it was a fairly small book).

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