As an engineer, there are aspects of software development that baffles me; more specifically, it's the developers. Although, a lot of features like Autoboxing, Generics and other features were added in Java 5, you will be surprised how many people are still not taking advantage of these features.
I recently started working on a project with one of the developers from another team upstairs, it turned out that he had never touched Generics until we added it in some of the code I wrote. For me this is something every developer should know; particularly if you work with Java. This has been a major part of the language as long as I can remember. Not using it in 2011 tells me that not only have these guys in another department writing code that are of low quality, it also means that they are not following good design, software principles and methods.
As learning is concerned, there are both free and commercial resources for learning how to use all the features in Java. Here are some of the resources I have used and still keep around the shelf if I want to make reference.
- Oracle Java Tutorial [pdf]
- Java Generics and Collections, by Maurice Naftalin and Philip Wadler
- Effective Java (second edition), by Joshua Bloch.
If you don't know where to begin, as always, a simple online search for tutorials will show you how they are used.
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