Preface

This book started life as a set of training notes written for new graduate intake in the Foreign Exchange IT department of Deutsche Bank. One of us (Ben), looking at the existing books on the market, found a lack of up-to-date material aimed at inexperienced Java developers. So he resolved to write that missing book.

With the encouragement of Deutsche’s IT management team, Ben traveled to the Devoxx conference in Belgium to look for inspiration on additional topics. There, he met three IBM engineers (Rob Nicholson, Zoe Slattery, and Holly Cummins), who introduced him to the London Java Community (LJC—London’s Java User Group).

The following Saturday was the annual Open Conference organized by the LJC—and it was at that conference that Ben met one of the leaders of the LJC, Martijn Verburg. By the end of the day—fueled by their mutual love of teaching, technical communities, and beer—they’d resolved to collaborate on the project and what would become The Well-Grounded Java Developer was born.

In this book, we hope that the theme of software development as a social activity rings out clearly. We believe that the technical aspects of the craft are important, but the more subtle concerns of communication and interaction between people are at least as important. It can be hard to explain these facets easily in a book, but that theme is present throughout.