The Java programming language appeared in the 1990s and, over time, software engineers have had to develop new requirements to meet current technologies and trends (for example, parallelism, web technologies, JavaScript, and concurrency). Java 8 is the latest release and a major revamp of the language. This book covers most of the new features of Java 8 (and 7), including enhancement of the language, runtime, JavaScript embedding, and tooling. The book is short, with nine chapters and fewer than 200 pages. Each chapter comes with a set of exercises.

Cay S. Horstmann is a highly experienced programmer. Hortsmann’s experience turns a simple list of language features into a high-quality book. The examples contained in the book are well chosen, independent of each other, and reflect day-to-day situations met by practitioners. The book is full of small technical points, offering an exciting perspective. I particularly appreciate the discussions about: monadic operations; using Nashorn within an Emacs mode to benefit from command-line recall; defining animations and the CSS style sheet in a user interface; and lambda versus anonymous inner classes. The book is not meant to be exhaustive, which is a rather positive aspect. It instead gives short and concise starting points. Readers wishing to know more can use their favorite web search engine.

The book is well balanced, though it remains rather light with regard to the security improvements of Java 8. This is not a serious miss, however, due to the very technical aspect of this topic: security fans are a rather specialized audience with their dedicated sources of information.

There are few books on Java 8 available. This is a high-quality book primarily made for practitioners. However, researchers and academics will also find it useful, as it offers an overview as to where Java is heading. The target audience is experienced programmers; novice programmers should probably rely on other books.

The author discusses what will come next in the Java programming language and its application programming interface (API), though it is unclear what will come out of the ferocious battle in the programming languages arena. It is clear by reading this book that Java is learning from other programming languages by offering advanced streaming features and map/reduce operations. The book does its job remarkably while giving hints of what the future may look like.

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