10 Java Programming Books for Beginners & Advanced Programmers

Throughout my programming career, here are the books that have helped me in one way or another to improve as a developer in no particular order.

These books have different difficulty levels so take your time to read them. It will definitely take years to finish all of them.

Clean Code
by Robert C Martin

This is an excellent book for beginners to refresh and reinforce the knowledge you gained during college about patterns, practices, and principles of writing clean code.

* To fully understand this book, you must have good knowledge of the object-oriented paradigm (abstract classes, interface, polymorphism).

Design Patterns Element of Reusable Object-Oriented Design
by Gang of Four

This is a must-have book with content that you will be able to use as long as you do programming. This will provide you a solid foundation when designing a software system. I can't express enough how important this book is; I wish I had known it back in college.

Basically, there are 3 major categories of design patterns:

1. Creational - how classes and objects are created or instantiated
2. Structural - how classes and objects are organized to form a larger structure and new functionalities
3. Behavioral - how objects communicate and behave with each other

Java Concurrency in Practice
by Doug Lea

This book is a bit old (Java 1.5) but the core theories, implementations, and features still apply to this day. The topics discussed here are really tricky and hard to understand especially for beginners. But with the ever-increasing demand for computing power, handling resources efficiently is becoming more important. Most computers nowadays support multi-threading where we can do transactions separately on different threads.

Domain-Driven Design - Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software
by Eric Evans

Introduction to Algorithms
by Thomas Cormen

Microservices Patterns With examples in Java
by Chris Richardson

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
by Martin Fowler

Refactoring Improving the Design of Existing Code
by Martin Fowler

The Basic of User Experience Design
by Interaction Design Foundation

The Pragmatic Programmer
by Andrew Hunt

UML for Java Programmers
by Robert Martin