Skimmer’s Guide for Week 7 of Functional Programming for the Object Oriented Programmer

“Pat yourself on the back! You have both used and implemented the built-in function reduce, perhaps the most dreaded of all sequence functions.”

What did we read about?

It’s our seventh week of ‘Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer‘ by Brian Manick.

We come to the end of the “Embedding and Object Oriented Language” with some exercises and a bit of wrap up.

• Begin on Page 73 at section 6.4 Exercises

• Exercise 1 (Page 73)
• Exercise 2 (Page 74)
• Exercise 3
• Exercise 4 (Page 75)
• Exercise 5
• Exercise 6

• Finish at Page 77 at the end of chapter 6

What stood out?

• Anybody playing the functional tutorial drinking game can take two drinks: one for recursion and the other for factorial
• The answer for each exercise feeds into the next, building up the complexity to use increasingly sophisticated forms of recursion.
• The exercises conclude by introducing the powerful reduce function.

If you read nothing else this week…

• Whatever you do make sure you complete exercises 1 to 6.
• Exercise 5 is partially tricky, kudos if you complete it without hints! (note the result doesn’t have to be in-order)

Becoming Data Scientists – May’s Packt Publishing Competition

If you want to have a chance of winning one of this months books then please sign up on the Meetup page.  

At the end of May the lucky winner will get a physical copy with an ebook for the runner up.

Data Science

Why Your Next HR Hire Should Be a Data Scientist @ Blogging4Jobs.com

The role of Data Scientist is new and important.  Big Data is seen as the key area for innovation, and the Data Scientist is a key role in putting Big Data to work.

So who are the Data Scientists, what do they do and does it include skills that we as developers may want to acquire?

The Data Scientist mines data for useful insights.  It’s a role that is closely related to the Computer Scientist, the role often fulfilled by developers like us.

Last month we looked at the tools used by the Computer Scientist, this month we look at the skills and tools needed by the Data Scientist.

The Data Scientist Role

In his Book “Data Visualisation – a Successful Design Process” Andy Kirk identifies the “Eight Hats” of data visualisation design:

• The Initiator – The leader who is seeks a solution.
• The Data Scientist – The data miner, wearing a miners hat, discovering nuggets of insight buried deep within the numbers.
• The Journalist – the story teller who refines the insight with narrative and context.
• The Computer Scientist – The person who breaths life into the project with their breadth of software and programming literacy.
• The Designer – With an eye for visual detail and a flair for innovation they work with the computer scientist to ensure harmony between form and function.
• The Cognitive Scientist – Brings an understanding of visual perception, colour theories and human-computer interaction to inform the design process.
• The Communicator – The negotiator and presenter who acts as the client-customer-designer gateway.
• The Project Manager – The co-ordinator who picks up the unpopular duties and makes sure that the project is cohesive, on time and on message.

These are hats, and we will probably find ourselves wearing several of them over time. As you can see, Data Visualisation requires us to pull together a range of disciplines in order to achieve something meaningful.

Last month we focused on the skills of the Computer Scientist, looking at the skills needed to pull the data out of the repository and put it in front of the audience.

Data Scientists are Data Miners

This month we are looking at the skills of the Data Scientist. Here’s Kirk’s full description:

The data scientist is characterized as the data miner, wearing the miner’s hat. They are responsible for sourcing, acquiring, handling, and preparing the data. This means demonstrating the technical skills to work with data sets large and small and of many different types. Once acquired, the data scientist is responsible for examining and preparing the data. In this proposed skill set model, it is the data scientist who will hold the key statistical and mathematical knowledge and they will apply this to undertake exploratory visual analysis to learn about the patterns, relationships, and descriptive properties of the data.

From Chapter 2 of Data Visualisation – A Successful Design Process

Last month we talked about data being the new soil.  The data scientist is a miner who digs down deep.  It is a pivotal roll in the design process. Kirk elaborates further:

If we don’t have the data we want, or the data we do have doesn’t tell us what we hoped it would, or the findings we unearth aren’t as interesting as we wish them to be there is nothing we can (legitimately) do about it. That is an important factor to remember. No amount of 3D-snazzy-cool-fancy-design dust sprinkled on to a project can change that.

An incomplete, error strewn or just plain dull dataset will simply contaminate your visualization with the same properties. So, the primary duty for us now is to avoid this happening, remove all guessing and hoping, and just get on with the task of acquiring our data and immerse ourselves into it to learn about its condition, its characteristics, and the potential stories it contains.

From Chapter 3 of Data Visualisation – A Successful Design Process

This month we’re going to look at some of the tools we can use as Data Scientists to immerse ourselves in the data. Tools that will help us to interact with our data, drill down into it’s seams and discover what nuggets lie within.

If you want to have a chance of winning one of this months books then please sign up on the Meetup page. At the end of May the lucky winner will get to choose a physical copy and the runner up can select an ebook.

Data Visualisation

Data Visualisation: a successful design process

For a second month we are going to look at Andy Kirk’s “Data Visualisation – a Successful Design Process.” It’s a great introduction to using Data Visualisation in your applications and the key text behind this series of competitions.

Kirk provides us with a structured approach to what can appear like a dark art. The task of data familiarisation, for example, is organised into the following steps:

1. Acquisition – Getting hold of the data.
2. Examination – Assessing the data’s completeness and fitness.
3. Data Types – Understanding the properties of the raw material. (Not to be confused with Data Types in our code.)
4. Transforming for Quality – Tidying and cleaning, filling in the gaps.
5. Transforming for Analysis – Preparing and refining for final use.
6. Consolidating – Bringing it all together, mashing it up with other sources.

From Chapter 3 of Data Visualisation – A Successful Design Process

Learning Highcharts for Javascript Data Visualisation

Highcharts allows the creation of sophisticated, interactive visualisations.

Let’s start at the ending: the consolidation of data to create an effective visualisation, like the one above.

Last month we looked at using HTML5 directly for producing our data visualisations. This month we’re going to look at Highcharts, a Javascript library built on top of HTML5 to provide stunning interactive charts with a lot less effort. It’s free for non-commercial use.

Highcharts provides interactivity, allowing the user’s to become data scientists and explore the data for themselves.

This is an easy approach for simple data mining needs, but the real value is in mining the rich seams of complex data through Data Analysis.  For this some powerful tools are needed.

Data Analysis

Data Analysis Cookbook

Chapter 5 talks about distributed processing with Hadoop

Anybody looking for a ‘real world’ use of Clojure should take a look at the Incanter libraries and the practical value they provide in the first phases of Data Science.  This is a Clojure cookbook that is full of solid, practical recipes for dealing with large datasets.  It shows you how to go beyond spreadsheets to deal with data on new scales of size and complexity.

The book is particularly strong on recipes for acquisition and transformation for quality and analysis.  The first chapter will show you how to pull in your data from a whole range of data sources, including JSON, XML, CSV, JDBC and Excel.  The second chapter will show you how to clean up your data with tools like regular expressions, synonym maps, custom data type parsers and the Valip validation library.

Eric Rochester’s Cookbook provides sound, practical recipes.  If you want to practical introduction to Data Analysis that will get you up, running and productive quickly then this is the place to start.

It also touches on a whole range of other related topics, such parallel programming, distributed processing and machine learning.

It isn’t so strong on the theoretical side of data analysis.  There’s a whistlestop tour of linear and non-linear relationships, Bayesian distributions and Bneford’s law in chapter 7.  Chapter 9 introduces Weka for machine learning.  In between chapter 8 shows you how to interface with Mathematica or R.

Statistical Analysis with R – Beginners Guide

A grouping of several plots displayed in the graphic window

If you want to learn more about the theory of data analysis you may want to consider working with R directly. R is the lingua franca of statistics and learning it will give you access to a wealth of resources available on the web.

In this Beginners guide the authors R John and M. Quick will show you how to get up and running with R.  The material is more abstract, with talk of standard deviations, linear models and ANOVA.  However, the authors make it more entertaining with a bit of role play.  Your are the lead strategist for a kingdom who must gather your intelligence, prepare the battle plans and brief the emperor and his generals.

When it comes to learning the mathematical theory the book doesn’t go much deeper than the Data Analysis Cookbook.  However, it does present the information in an entertaining way and by learning R you open the door to working directly with a tool used by mathematicians rather than programmers.

Big Data

Statistical analysis has been around for a long time, but it is now being performed with more data than ever before.  Companies like Google and Facebook are now working with data on an unprecedented scale and that is why there is so much buzz about Big Data.

If you want to work with Big Data, processing massive data sets measured in the terabytes, then the essential tool to learn is Map Reduce.

MapReduce Cookbook

 

More advanced MapReduce scenarios are described.

The authors are well qualified.  Srinath Perera is a Senior Software Architect at WSO2 and has a Ph.D.  Thilina Gunarathne is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Informatics and Computing of Indiana University.  The have provided 90 recipes, presented in a simple and straightforward manner, with step-by-step instructions and real world examples.  These recipes guide you through the complex business of getting Hadoop up and running and then not only demonstrate what MapReduce is but how it can be applied to problems such as analytics, indexing, searching, classification and text processing on a massive scale.  Along the way you will be exposed to the tools and techniques that are fundamental to working with big data.

Infinispan Data Grid Platform

While Hadoop is implemented in Java, and offers a Java API it doesn’t reallly sit within the Java ecosystem.  Using Hadoop requires the learning of a whole new eco system.  To use it properly you’ll need to get to know complementary apache projects such as HBase, Hive, and Pig.

If you want to get to be able to experiment with MapReduce and distributed computing while staying firmly within the Java ecosystem then consider the Infispan data grid platform.  Installing Infinispan is as easy as installing jBoss AS7 and you can use it to provide persistance for your standard CDI applications without alteration.  The authors are Java people.  Francesco Marchioni has written several books on the JBoss application server and Manik Surtani is the specification lead of JSR 347 (Data Grids for the Java Platform).

The book offers practical guidence to get you up and running with Infinispan platform.  While none of them deal with MapReduce, they will leave you well equipped to follow the online documentation.

Skimmer’s Guide for Week 4 of Functional Programming for the Object Oriented Programmer

“This reality is usefully obscured by the language so that programmers can, without thinking, do wonderful things, blissfully pretending that the pictures in their head are what the computer is really doing.”

What did we read about?

This is our fourth week reading Functional Programming for the Object Orientated Programmer.

• Begin on page 47 (“All the Class in a Constructor”) and read until page 54, leaving the exercises for next week.

The bare believable object from week three is developed further by moving the Class out of the constructor and introducing object instantiation and message dispatch.

What stood out?

• The Let special form was introduced.

If you read nothing else this week…

• Make sure you read about the Let special form.

Skimmers Guide for Week 2 of Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer

“How do you write loops in Clojure? You don’t (mostly).”

What did we read about?

This is our second week reading Functional Programming for the Object Orientated Programmer.

• Finish Chapter 1 – from 1.11 Vectors

After discussing vectors and how they differ to lists we finally discuss what we might consider the basic elements of a programming language: loops, conditionals and different methods for passing parameters.  The chapter concludes with four pages of exercises.

In a language like Java we are usually introduced to the control flow first and the data structures come later.  Here the reverse approach is taken: with a discussion on data structures coming first and the control flow following.  The chapter is then disparaging about both conditionals and loops.

What stood out?

• In structured programming there are three basic constructs: sequence, selection and repetition.  In functional programming sequence is achieved using lists.  Conditionals are introduced with a reference to the Anti-IF Campaign and regarding repetition we are told that we dont write loops (mostly).  This book is forcing us to think about programming in a new way.
• Rather than walking through the common functions the reader is given an exercise (5) with a list and told to think of a problem it could solve and then solve it.  The reader is not being spoon fed.

If you read nothing else this week…

• Work through the exercises in section 1.18.

Further research

• If you’re new to Clojure then I would strongly recommend Clojure Made Simple.  It will provide you with many essential tips that will help you stay sane.  In section 2.8, for example, you’ll find out how to access the built in docs are referred to in exercise 5.  Type “(doc take)” at the  REPL and you’ll quickly discover that it “returns a lazy sequence of the first n items in coll,”  That will definitely help you keep your sanity.
• Take a look at the Anti-IF Campaign.
• The classic book Thinking Forth has an excellent chapter on “Minimizing Control Structures:”  “The use of control structures adds complexity to your code.  The more complex your code is the harder it will be for you to read and maintain. The more parts a machine has, the greater are its chances of breaking down.  And the harder it is for someone to fix.”  The principles explained are good for any language.

Beautiful Data – April’s Packt Publishing Competition

If you want to have a chance of winning one of this months books then please sign up on the Meetup page.  

At the end of April the lucky winner will get a physical copy with an ebook for the runner up.

Data is the New Soil

Nightingale’s Rose

It has been said that “Data is the New Oil.”  In his excellent Ted Talk David McCandless tells us that “Data is the New Soil“:

It feels like we’re all suffering from information overload, or data glut. And the good news is there might be an easy solution to that, and that’s using our eyes more. So visualizing information, so that we can see the patterns and connections that matter, and then designing that information so it makes more sense, or it tells a story, or allows us to focus only on the information that’s important…. Visualizing information like this is a form of knowledge compression. It’s a way of squeezing an enormous amount of information and understanding into a small space.

http://www.cjr.org/the_news_frontier/data_is_the_new_soil.php?page=all

There’s a lot of value in creating something that takes the information overload and transform it into a form that makes the story it tells clear.

An inspiring example of this was Florence Nightingale’s Rose Diagram, pictured above.  The lady was able to analyse and present data.  The lady of the lamp’s use of data visualisation saved countless lives:

After the war, Nightingale wrote a passionate report on why the soldiers had died in such large numbers and it revealed the astonishing fact that out of 18,000 deaths, 16,000 had been due to infectious diseases in hospital rather than battle wounds. The report included her revolutionary and controversial ‘Rose Diagram’, whose message was potent and direct – hospitals can kill. The diagram was designed to persuade the British government that, if sanitation in hospitals was improved, many deaths could be avoided. Nightingale’s pioneering diagram was a catalyst in the creation of better and cleaner hospitals that would go on to save thousands of lives.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wgqlq

How can we as developers use data visualisation to make a difference?  This month we shall look at books that show us how to design, display, store, access and secure data.  With these tools in hand your are ready to inspire with the beauty of data.

If you want to have a chance of winning one of this months books then please sign up on the Meetup page.  At the end of April the lucky winner will get a physical copy with an ebook for the runner up.

Visualising Data

Data Visualization: a successful design process

Andy Kirk is the author of the Visualising Data blog.  There you will find him talking about powerful visualisations like this:

Iraq’s bloody toll

His book offers a handy strategy guide to help you approach your data visualization work with greater know-how and increased confidence. It is a practical book structured around a proven methodology that will equip you with the knowledge, skills, and resources required to make sense of data, to find stories, and to tell stories from your data.

HTML5 Graphing and Data Visualization Cookbook

We are developers not graphic artists, so when it comes to telling the story from our data we won’t be reaching for our pencils.  Instead we will look to the graphs and charts provided by our user interface framework.  The widest possible audience is available using the standard components provided by HTML5.

Ben Fhala has developed applications for governments and companies and directed many award-winning projects,  He was worked on teams that have won three Agency of the Year awards.  In this cookbook he shares recipes for bringing static data to life.

Data Highs

Data visualisation applications are hungry for fast fast and reliable storage.  Here are two possible approaches: with and without sql.

High Availability MySQL Cookbook

Alex Davies covers all the major techniques available for achieving high availability for MySQL, including clustering, replication, shared storage and block level replicaiton.

Cassandra High Performance Cookbook 

Traffic Monitoring benefits from data visualisation

Edward Capriolo‘s recipes include how to access data stored in Cassandra and use third party tools to help you out. He also describes how to maintain high levels of performance through monitoring and capacity planning.

Data through the Middle

You have data in your repository feeding graphics in your user interface.  Sitting in-between is the middleware that makes the data available to the clients that need it while keeping out those who shouldn’t see it.  Here are two books that show how Spring can make working with that middleware easier.

Spring Data

Spring Data

Petri Kainulainen‘s book shows how JPA repositories can be implemented with less code. Sample project demonstrate the concepts in action.

Spring Security

User Management

Robert Winch and Peter Mularien use a simple Spring Web MVC-based application to illustrate how to solve real-world problems.

Skimmers Guide for Week 8 of The Well Grounded Java Developer

“As you can imagine, people are somewhat passionate about their favorite web framework!”

What did we read about?

This week we finish our first book.

• Chapter 13. Rapid web development

• Chapter 14. Staying well-grounded

The chapter on rapid development begins by looking at the why Java is less than ideal for rapid web development.  It explains why static typing and the need to build and deploy slow down web development.  Matt Raible’s rating scheme was used to assess the available web frameworks and Grails came out on top. An extended practical introduction to Grails, a Groovy based framework, followed.  The chapter concluded with a brief look at Clojure’s Complojure framework.

The final chapter looked to the future and the new features promised for Java 8.  The introduction of Lambdas will allow for a more functional style of programming using plain old Java.  We also read about the modularity of Project Jigsaw, but the text is a little out of date.  Jigsaw has been postponed to Java 9.  The book concludes by looking further into the future and the promises of Meta Object Protocols, Coroutines and Tuples.

What stood out?

• The Grails walkthrough covers a LOT of ground.  If you can spare the time to work through it you won’t be disappointed.

• For those who are not yet ready to abandon Java there are plenty of useful tips showing how to make Java web development less painful.  They point to tools like Spring Roo and JRebel.

• The comprehensive tooling of Grails and the design simplicity of Compojure make for an interesting contrast.

If you read nothing else this week…

• “Criteria in selecting a web framework” uses Matt Railbles rating scheme to take an objective view of the frameworks available.  It uses a weighted rating scheme based on 20 criteria to rank the frameworks.  It’s good to see rational reasoning in a field dominated by tool evangelism.  Remember to change the weightings to reflect your needs.  How does your favourite framework score?

• If you haven’t got time to work through the Grails example then please spend a couple of hours on Compojure.  It shows how good design can makes things easy through simplicity.

Now For Something Completely Different: March’s Packt Publishing Competition

If you want to have a chance of winning one of this months books then please sign up on the Meetup page.  

This month both the winner and the runner up will receive an e-book.

Now For Something Completely Instant

When was the last time you tried something completely different?  Something that wasn’t part of what you do already?

It can be useful to try something that is completely outside what you normally do.  It helps you to see things from a different perspective and challenges you preconceptions about how things need to be.

The big problem is finding the time in a busy day to try new things.  This is why this month we are focusing on Packt Publishing’s Instant range.  They are a set of short, to the point eBooks that show you how to do something new.

Instants are eBooks only, so for this month only both the winner and the runner up will receive eBooks.  That’s different!

For a chance to win just RSVP to this month’s event.

It’s Virtual!

If you still don’t know about the virtualisation technologies then you need to read one of these guides.

Instant Citrix XenDesktop 5 Starter

Mahmoud Magdy shows how to provide virutalised desktops using XenDesktop.

Instant VMware vCloud Starter

Daniel Langenhan shows how to create a complete networked environment from templates using vCloud.

It’s Microsoft!

Are you ready to look at what Redmond have to offer?

Instant Team Foundation Server 2012 and Project Server 2010 Integration How-to

How much time do you spend integrating and setting up environments rather than coding?  Gary P. Gauvin will show you how to get these things done quickly and easily, step by step.  What took days can take hours.

Instant Silverlight 5 Animation

Silverlight might be going away, but the XAML based technology isn’t.  Nick Polyak will show you how to use animation to improve the user experience in several contexts, including business applications.

 It’s Changing

With everything changes so rapidly you can’t afford to let things go stale.

The New iPad: Using New Features in iOS 6 How-To

Does nothing stop changing these days?  That IPad you brought a while ago isn’t the same Ipad anymore.  It’s been updated with new features like multiple mailboxes, iCloud synchronisation, photostreams and a new suite of apps.  Renee J. Valdez’s concise guide will introduce you to all these new features.

InnoDB Quick Reference Guide

How we use databases is in a state of flux.  After decades of SQL stability the way we store data is being turned upside down as developers say no to SQL.

InnoDB is MySQL without the SQL.  It allows you to work directly with the storage engine.

Let Matt Reid show you how to set up, configure and use the engine.

Skimmers Guide for Week 7 of The Well Grounded Java Developer

Test Driven Development

“The best way to get into the TDD groove is to start practicing. ”

What did we read about?

The week we started part 4 of the book: “Crafting the polyglot project”.  We covered two chapters:

• Chapter 11: Test-driven development
• Chapter 12: Build and continuous integration

For test driven development we looked at the the three steps of TDD: Red, Green and Refactor.  We also read about the different types of test doubles: Dummies, Stubs, Fakes and Mocks.  Two testing frameworks were covered: jUnit and ScalaTest.

For build and continuous integration we looked at why having a standard and repeatable build is so important, remember: “friends don’t let friends build artifacts from the IDE!” We walk through using two widely used tools, Maven 3 for building and Jenkins for CI.

 

What stood out?

 

• If you’re new to TDD then the section “TDD in a Nutshell” provides an excellent introduction.  If you are familiar with TDD you can happily skip it,
• The section on “Test Doubles” provided an excellent overview. In the earlier chapters it was suggested that you should start introducing new languages through testing.  “Introducing ScalaTest” shows you exactly how to get started.
•  Colourful introduction to why we need CI, which too many of us will be able to relate to!

 

If you read nothing else this week…

 

• “Test Doubles” –  If you only ever use Mocks then you should give it a read and expand your toolkit.
•  ”Code metrics with Maven and Jenkins” – handy if you don’t know about static code analysis.

 

 

Well Grounded: February’s Packt Publishing Competition

If you want to have a chance of winning one of this months books then please sign up on the Meetup page.  

At the end of February the lucky winner will get a physical copy with an ebook for the runner up.

The Well Grounded Java Developer

February sees the start of our regular reading schedule.  Our first book, the Well Grounded Java Developer, provides a whistle-stop tour of everything that is important right now in the world of Java Development: new language features, the underlying JVM, alternative languages and continuous integration.

After these brief introductions readers will want to dig deeper, and this month we’ll be looking at a selection of books offered by Packt Publishing that will be perfect for taking things further.

You can win any one of these books again this month by signing up on the Meetup page.  First prize is a physical copy the second prize is an electronic version.

Vital Java

In the first part of their book Ben and Martijn help us to understand the difference between the Java language and the Java platform.  These are the tools of our trade and as craftsmen we need to know them well.

Java 7 New Features Cookbook

Father and daughter team Richard and Jennifer Reese provide a well considered set of recipes for the new feature that were introduced in Java 7.

Oracle JRockit: The Definitive Guide

Marcus Hirt and Marcus Lagergren book is not for the beginner.  The second chapter explains why adaptive code generation is harder in a JVM than a static environment.  After that they go deep.  The book covers memory mangement, threading and other fundamental building blocks of the Java platform.  Some of the tooling is starting to date a little (the book is three years old) but the insights it provides are timeless.

The Groovy Polyglot

While java isn’t ideal for solving problems in the dynamic layer Groovy most certainly is.

Groovy for Domain-Specific Languages

Author Fergal Dearle shows us the power of Domain Specific Languages.  He shows us how we can open up the development process to other stakeholders and improve our own productivity.

Grails 1.1 Web Application Development

Developing web applications is a dynamic activity and Jon Dickinson shows us how to conquer it using the Grails framework.  Along the way you will achieve a great deal without have to write much code.

Well Crafted

A good build environment is essential for a craftsmanship based approach to development.  If you are to get the immediate feedback that you need to improve yourself and your code you need it built, deployed and tested quickly and automatically. Maven and Jenkins help you to achieve this.

Apache Maven 3 Cookbook

Maven is popular but polarising.  If you are to be one of those people who loves Maven then you will have to get to know it well.

This cookbook by Srirangan shows how Maven can be used as part of an Agile team environment, favouring quick practical examples over the lengthy discussion and long property lists of some other Maven books.

Jenkins Continuous Integration Cookbook

Author Alan Mark Berg has a degree, two masters and a teacher qualifications.  He has also written two books on Sakai.  On top of that he has found time to write this practical guide to Jenkins.  Here is a man who clearly knows a thing or two about productivity.

As well as an introduction to Jenkins the book is also an introduction to the Jenkins community.  This adds an extra, important dimension that is often overlooked.

Our First Book: The Well Grounded Java Developer

The Well Grounded Java Developer

After conversations on our Google+ community we’ve decided to kick off our reading with “The Well Grounded Java Developer.”  It’s a book written by LJC members Martijn and Ben and published by Manning.

It’s the perfect starting book because it covers so much.  In just a couple of months we’ll have read and talked about everything that matters.  It’s ideal for both the beginner and the experienced developer who needs to catch up.

Every monday I’ll do a kick off post to help everybody pace themselves.

The Schedule

• Week 1: Developing with Java 7 
  • Chapter 1. Introducing Java 7
  • Chapter 2. New I/O
• Week 2: Vital Techniques
  • Chapter 3. Dependency Injection
  • Chapter 4. Modern concurrency
• Week 3: Going Deeper
  • Chapter 5. Class files and bytecode
  • Chapter 6. Understanding performance tuning
• Week 4: Polyglot Programming on the JVM
  • Chapter 7. Alternative JVM languages
  • Chapter 8. Groovy: Java’s dynamic friend
• Week 5: Functional Programming on the JVM
  • Chapter 9. Scala: powerful and concise
  • Chapter 10. Clojure: safer programming
• Week 6: Crafting the polyglot project
  • Chapter 11. Test-driven development
  • Chapter 12. Build and continuous integration
• Week 7: The End is Near
  • Chapter 13. Rapid web development
  • Chapter 14. Staying well-grounded

Slow and Steady

This is probably slower than most of us usually take to finish a book this size.  Taking it more slowly will give us a chance to try all the examples and go off on some tangents.