Harvard Dictionary of Music: Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged

Average customer rating:

Comprehensive and useful

Excellent resource but a new, revised edition is needed.

excellent resource, authoritative

This book is THE essential reference for musicians

Harvard Dictionary of Music: Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged
Willi Apel
Manufacturer: Belknap Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Similar Items:

The Harvard Dictionary of Music: Fourth Edition (Harvard University Press Reference Library)

The Cambridge Music Guide

The Oxford Dictionary of Music

The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music (Harvard University Press Reference Library)

The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (Harvard University Press Reference Library)

ASIN: 0674375017

Book Description

A classic and invaluable reference work for over thirty years. Soon after its initial publication, the Harvard Dictionary of Music by Willi Apel was firmly established as a standard and essential resource for everyone concerned with music. The product of exceptional scholarship, it was praised as being comprehensive, concise, authoritative, scholarly, and enjoyable. Leopold Stokowski wrote, "I so often consult your dictionary of music, and with such never failing enlightenment, that I must offer you my thanks for your unique book, so profound and so broad in scope ... The vast scholarship... is of immeasurable value to the whole world of music." The Christian Science Monitor called it "a highly satisfying book of musical knowledge, in which basic definitions are given with fine intellectual integrity, and musical facts are carefully separated from plausible deductions or theories."

For this second edition the dictionary has been thoroughly revised, updated, and substantially enlarged. Mr. Apel and eightyeight other eminent music scholars have contributed new articles and revised old ones completely. The already comprehensive list of accurate definitions has grown measurably and it now even includes nothus, pyiba, and meringue.

In the greatly expanded coverage of ethnomusicology, cumbia-an Afro-Panamanian dance form - and Vietnam are only two of the new entries. Additionally, all the general information about individual countries has been revised and the discussion of both theory and history has been amply increased. Developments of the last two decades are given special attention with particular emphasis on compositional techniques, including electronic music and serial music. Individual compositions, representative of every type from every era, are described.

The bibliography following each article, a unique feature of the first edition, has been updated and expanded. There are fifty percent more illustrations than in the first edition, including explicit drawings of instruments, clear music examples, diagrams, charts and a full-page outline of the history of music.

An extensive list of the most important music libraries and collections throughout the world with summaries of their significant musical holdings is a valuable part of the dictionary. The section on historical editions now lists fifty-three collections of music and briefly describes each volume within each collection.

The Harvard Dictionary of Music, Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged, is the result of imaginative, specialized, modern, and reliable music scholarship. Containing nearly 1000 pages of precise and accessible information on all musical subjects, it offers over fifty percent more material than the first edition. It is essential not only to the scholar of music, the professional performer, and the practicing amateur, but to everyone who has ever anticipated the pleasure of a weekly musical broadcast, purchased a favorite recording, or truly enjoyed a concert.

Customer Reviews:

Comprehensive and useful.......2005-10-02

This book, together with 'Baker's Bigoraphical Dictionary of Musicians', is one of my most frequently used reference books. The edition I have is Willi Apel's second edition, revised and expanded; there is a later Harvard Dictionary of Music done by another editor, but this one has been on my shelf for over twenty years, and I have come to find it incredibly useful for ready reference as well as giving information for further research.

Most entries have citation and bibliographic information so that further research becomes an easier task; my one regret in this direction is that there has been so much scholarly work done in the past thirty years since this publication that is missed from this listing, but much of music reference material is not that time sensitive.

This is a very comprehensive text with regard to music technical information, particularly when it comes to ancient, medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods. In the modern area, it is a little less helpful, and does not really address the area of pop music at all.

The one thing I could wish for would be an index of some sort in the rear; even designed as a dictionary, many articles become encyclopedic in length or nature, and an index would have made this that much more useful. However, there is a good deal of cross-referenced material, making it easy to use in research mode.

The entries themselves range from just a few words (for example, Gusto, con [It.] - With style, with zest.) to multi-page entries (examples include the entries on countries such as France and Germany, discussing their histories of musical tradition). There are entries of history, of technique, of composition, of instruments, even of the mathematics and physics of sound, harmony and rhythm. Many major opeas and other musical pieces have entries - however, this is not a biographical dictionary, so there are very few entries of this sort. The listings go from Mozarabic chant to Mozarteum, for instance, without Mozart between them.

One might have minor quibbles here and there with the data (and no such undertaking as massive as this dictionary can be without fault and error), but in general, this dictionary serves the general seeker and the student of music very well.

Excellent resource but a new, revised edition is needed........2001-04-06

As someone who knows extemely little about classical music who wants to know more, I bought this book some time ago and, it has been quite helpful. However, it is also true that although this the twenty first printing was in 1997, this, the Revised Edition was copyrighted in 1972 by Willi Apel (and previous copyright dates of the book were 1944 and 1969 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College). This Second Edition undoubtely needs to be revised. Since I have had it, I have noticed only a of couple areas in which I think it needs to be changed (and it has been extremely helpful as to others). Firstly, The entry on "Ballet" on pages 73-76. On page 75 this book still says "There is still much disagreement about the quality of the ballet in the Soviet Union" and proceeds with a brief paragraph about ballets performed and produced there. Since it not only is the Soviet Union not the Soviet Union any more, and since other things have changed as well since Willi Apel's page 75, there really ought to be revisions in this book reflecting that. Secondly, as to the entry "Voices-ranges" on page 920, this book says, "Human voices are usually divided into six ranges: three female voices, soprano, mezzo-soprano and contralto, and three male voices, tenor, baritone and bass" and subsquesntly gives subcategories of these, but omits countertenor entirely from this entry which it should not. It isn't that countertenor can't be located in this book. It is not with the rest of the voice types where it belongs, in my opinon. When I found it what it said was "OLD (CAPS MINE) name for (male) alto, derived from CONTRATENOR ALTUS [See Contratenor] which I did on page 204 which said in part, that it explains, that four part writing and the consequent separation of ranges resulted in a renaming so that there existed contratenor altus (alto) and contrateor bassus (bass) which, the book says, explains the name alto "for a part that, from a modern point of view, can hardly be considered 'high', as well as countertenor for the male alto". This entry sounds to me like it has relegated countertenors, who are alive and performing and recording now, to history. In my opinion the term countertenor should be included in the entry "Voices-ranges" with the rest of the male and female voice types, so they are all together where they belong. This entry also refers the reader to the word alto page on page 31, which states of the male alto "....(2) Originally the alto was a high male voice....this type of voice, also known as countertenor, was cultivated especially in England, where the church music of the 16th and 17th centuries definitely implies its use." What this entry and these entires taken together also imply is that countertenors, male altos as such, are history since they are not included in the entry "Voices-ranges" as extant in the world which is to say living now , performing now, and recording now. Saying that this voice type (p. 31) was cultivated in England where the church music of the 16th and 17th centuries implies its use says nothing to me about the use of this voice type in the latter half of the 20th cantury and in the 21st century. I am very new to classical music and I am living proof that it doesn't require a lot to know that t here are countertenors : Charles Brett, countertenor, one of the male soloists ( the soloists on this CD which is of Händel's Messiah are: one soprano, one mezzo-soprano, the aforementioned countertenor, one tenor, one bass, and one boy soprano) singing as recorded on this exceptional recording of this 18th century work conducted by John Eliot Gardiner is one. I also have at the present time one recording each of Dunstable's Motets and The Old Hall Manuscript by The Hilliard ensemble (two countertenors, three tenors, two baritones) which I been able to listen to as much as I'd like to, but have enjoyed nevertheless. This book needs to be revised as to this subject matter and with a view to enabling readers to become aware of all of the voice types that there are as well as what they capable in the appropriate place which is in the same place. Additionally, since there have been recordings of works on period instruments for more than a few years, it would help if the differences between, for example, a period violin and modern violin were addressed in this book and they are not. As someone who knows little about this I hope that, for others( I am not in a position to buy a new edition of this book, if ever there will be one), there will be a revised edition without these problems. Highly recommended otherwise , however, at this time.

excellent resource, authoritative.......2000-06-05

This is the dictionary that I used when I attended the USC School of Music. The entries are unsurpassed so far as classical music is concerned, but I did have to look for other resources when I needed accurate indepth information on jazz or popular music. It would be difficult in this day and age to have one all-encompassing reference on every musical style in existence, so I think that the work stands on its own and may dilute its effectiveness if it were to overextend itself by trying to accomodate everybody. As a former composition student and someone who scored in the top 3% on the music theory portion of the graduate record exam, I wholeheartedly recommend this dictionary.

This book is THE essential reference for musicians.......1999-10-04

This reference book has it all. I have never been disappointed when looking up a musical term -- everything from musical periods, notation, tempo markings in all languages I've come across, descriptions of musical forms, and theory concepts. It should be on the bookshelf of every serious musician.

Book Description

Dr. Laura Schlessinger is the hottest thing to hit national radio since Rush Limbaugh. Sixty thousand people call in to The Dr. Laura Show every day to get abused and berated for admitting their flaws and imperfections. Nearly twenty million people tune in across the country to listen to the humiliation, and more than 2.5 million have bought one of her bestsellers-with the latest book hitting bookstores this September. Dr. Laura has been the subject of countless articles, including features in Vanity Fair and New York magazine. And she recently announced that she has signed an exclusive deal for an hour-long, daily, innovative daytime TV program showcasing her unique insights into today's issues and problems, which will begin airing in the fall of 2000.Catering to a nearly spellbound cult following, Dr. Laura has built a veritable media empire by spreading moral wisdom and commonsense advice. But what the enchanted public doesn't know is that Schlessingers' own life is a labyrinth of contradictions-from her own divorce (she openly and adamantly chastises divorcees on the air) to her estrangement for her sister and mother (she is known for her supposedly emphatic adherence to family). And is the doctor really a licensed physician? Find out what classmates, colleagues, patients, and pals have to say about the real Dr. Laura! This book turns the tables on America's number-one moral drill sergeant and professional perfectionist, revealing the personal inconsistencies that define the guru himself.

Customer Reviews:

Not a nice person.......2007-03-03

As I was reading this book, I kept asking myself "Who is the worse woman: Laura Schlessinger or Martha Stewart?" I still haven't answered that question.

Laura had no close friends, had almost a non-existent relationship with her parents and siblings, and she had her mousey husband constantly stiff people. Although Laura proclaims she didn't work when she was raising her son, she in fact did work at radio stations in his very young years (1-3).

Dr. Laura is a very controlling person, but should be very grateful to people who assisted her in her career but isn't. She did everything she could to sabotage the career of another radio personality (person & station forgotten at the moment) when she was her co-worker. Laura wasn't very professional, as she was too chummy with her patients and used them for her own personal use.

Dr. Laura's female fans will no doubt dismiss the book and her critics and those who are neutral about her will probably enjoy the book. Similar to Martha Stewart in that Martha's fans thought that she got the shaft in her criminal sentence, and those who hated her or were neutral thought that she got off too easy.

Informative and Rather Entertaining Biography of a Sociopath.......2004-08-05

I enjoyed this book for giving the history of Dr. Laura which she of course never references while telling others that they are wrong for the mistakes they make. Dr. Laura made the same "mistakes" or were they "on-purposes"? Having her tubal ligation reversed in order to become pregnant by a married man was an extremely manipulative act. And it seems that Dr. Laura has remained manipulative, not to mention sadistic, to the present time. What she did to Dr. Barbara DeAngelis (having the nerve to claim that her psychology degree was bogus, when Dr. Laura's OWN degree is in physiology, NOT psychology) is downright bizarre, yet she got away with it. Her audiences must consist only of masochistic idiots who believe that they deserve to be called stupid by a woman who doesn't practice what she preaches. Scary that there are so many morons out there trusting in a woman pretending to be something she's not.

Fair, meticulous--needs an update.......2004-04-02

I've always been fascinated by people who move to California to "become" what they felt they couldn't back in their home town. Those who set out to reinvent themselves seldom fully succeed--and proof positive of this fact is Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Vickie L. Bane interviewed a great many people and carefully researched other press and anecdotal accounts of Schlessinger's rise to radio stardom.

The picture isn't pretty, and time after time, Dr. Laura's own life completely refutes the ideas that she presses forcefully on her callers to her radio programs, some of whom appear acutely masochistic, if not unrealistic to believe that they can "fix" what ails them in a three-minute phone chat, often laced with sarcasm, hostility or even abuse from Dr. Laura.

Dr. Laura doesn't believe in divorce, pre- or extramarital sex, or writing off one's family members, and yet she has done every one of those things: She became estranged from her father, mother, and younger sister. She dumped the nice Jewish orthodontist she married and never mentions. She engaged in an enthusiastic affair with Los Angeles radio legend Bill Ballance (who speaks very candidly with Bane), who helped her get into radio. Dr. Laura lured her current husband, Lew Bishop, away from his wife and three children, had her tubal ligation reversed in order to conceive out of wedlock. Eventually she and Bishop married and produced a child as goopily extolled (and, to my mind, as exploited) as Kathie Lee Gifford's kids Cody and Cassidy. Child of a Jewish father and Catholic mother, Dr. Laura converted to Orthodox Judaism, a choice that she uses as a bludgeon to people that she perceives as less "committed" to her brand of situational morality.

Bane neatly debunks Dr. Laura's "I'm My Kid's [Full-Time] Mom" shtick by documenting how and when Laura returned to work after her son's birth. As a child, Deryk ran wild in the hallways of KFI. For quite awhile, Dr. Laura used her visibility as a radio shrink as bait for prospective patients, one of whom details a disturbing breach of professional ethics, that of respecting strict boundaries of behavior between therapist and client. This former client was also a "friend" to Dr. Laura, and went shopping and lunching with her, as well as babysitting for Deryk.

This book, though complete as is, would benefit from an update with events that also reflect upon Dr. Laura's post-publication life--such as the failure of Dr. Laura's television show, her defection from Orthodox Judaism, and the fact that her mother, to whom Laura had not spoken for years, died alone in her apartment in Beverly Hills and wasn't found for days.

Isn't it funny-peculiar how right-leaning cheerleaders for their own definition of morality extend the statute of limitations on their own personal "youthful indiscretions" well into their forties? Schlessinger is no exception(...)

A One-Time Fan.......2004-02-09

Initially, when Dr. Laura first came to prominence, I was very much in favor of her no-nonsense, take full responsibility message. I have read one of her early books and a fair number of her other writings, so I can definitely say I'm familiar with both sides of this story. I generally avoid these tell all "unauthorized" biographies as they tend to be salacious, sensationalized, mean-spirited, and overtly one sided against whoever the subject matter is about. I did not find this to be true with this book (surprising, considering the author writes for People, not the most highbrow publication out there)! Any dirt slinging or positive comments for that matter, are done by people who know or worked with Dr. Laura, not by the author, who simply reports it, and I felt, let the reader make of it what they would. Adding to the credibility of the sources is that most of them are quoted by name and specific circumstances, dates, etc., with the obvious exceptions of former patients. I won't bother wasting space extolling the examples of hypocrisy, nastiness, and other little known facts you'll discover here. I imagine if you're researching this book, you've already figured out on your own, like myself, that Dr. Laura is not the paragon of virtue she originally seemed to be.

A blockbuster in '98, now woefully out of date.......2003-11-03

When this book was written, Dr. Laura was a rising radio star. Schlessinger's show was still on its way to a zenith of 470 radio stations across the United States and Canada. Controversies had erupted here and there, but nothing that stayed on national radar. The only place those sorts of things were discussed was the Usenet newsgroup alt.radio.talk.dr-laura (still going strong after 7 years). Leslie Bennetts had written a critical piece in Vanity Fair, and other cover stories also raised eyebrows with suggestions that the Queen of Preach, Teach, and Nag did not Do As She Said.

The Bane bio, written without any contact with Schlessinger or her husband, brought in all this backstory. Bane met with plenty of Schlessinger's former colleagues who were willing to complain about their run-ins with Schlessinger. The result paints a very disturbing picture of the woman who had the second biggest radio audience after Rush Limbaugh. Read the book for some fascinating insight into Dr. Laura Schlessinger, but realize that the juiciest bits happened well after the book went to press.

Average customer rating:
Dr. Laura: The Unauthorized Biography
Vickie L. Bane
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Paperbacks
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OTIDXI

Customer Reviews:

I would like to see this book updated.......2005-04-26

Great book but needs to be updated.

While it's still a nice introduction, it has become dated.......2003-04-27

This 2nd edition of Cockroft's classic on Sun Performance Tuning was a step up from the somewhat meager meal served in its 1st edition.

At the time of its writing this book filled a void, since there was not much "out there" covering performance tuning in general as well as for Sun boxes in particular.

Mike Loukides' "System Performance Tuning" still hung around in its 1st edition, and thus had established itself somewhat as the grand-daddy of UNIX performance tuning books, but was already pretty outdated. It's 2nd edition was still years away.

While Adrian Cockroft's "Sun Performance and Tuning" today still provides some interesting insights, and therefore could be a welcome addition to a Sun system administrator's bookshelf, there's another book which should be considered first: "Resource Management" from the Sun BluePrints series, which he wrote in collaboration with Richard Mc Dougall, and various others.

only if you're just starting out.......2001-10-25

After reading the other reviews I had high hopes for this book. The book is not geared to people that already have basic sysadmin skills. And in one case the book makes a rather dubious statement. They list a few ndd parameters and state "The other values should never be changed on a production system." Well, they left out tcp_ip_abort_cinterval. And they don't mention tcp_ip_abort_linterval at all which so far seems to be an undocumented Sun Microsystems parameter. A book about tuning should cover all the tunable parameters and explain cause/effect. Simply stating that you never change the other parameters without explaining why isn't why you buy a book on Performance and Tuning.

If you're just starting out with Sun administration and do not know a lot of the unix commands to administer and monitor a Solaris box this book will help. The book does cover much of the basics and background that someone starting out needs. The book does leave out a number of higher level concepts and doesn't cover all tunable parameters so it doesn't really help much beyond already available text/webpages which you'll still have to research and scour to really learn the whole story on Solaris performance and tuning. But if you already know some of what you're doing you're money is better kept in your pocket.

Indispensible.......2001-08-26

The first 5 pages alone helped me to tune my systems, setup cachefs, etc. Definitely worth the money if you are responsible for the care and feeding of Solaris boxes.

Best book on SUN Performance...so far.......2000-06-20

There is no question that if you are involved in performance related issues on the SUN Sparc platform, you have to buy this book. It gives you invaluable information and helps you determine what is actually happening on a given system. Having said that, I wish it was better written and organized. This book is intended, I feel, for the intermediate to advanced systems administrator.

Average customer rating:

Ups and Downs, but generally down
Authoritative and practical, but not for everyone
A report from the field...
Provides ideas on tactical optimization for performance gain
Substantial and comprehensive text

Java Performance Tuning (2nd Edition)
Jack Shirazi
Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0596003773

Book Description

Performance has been an important issue for Java developers ever since the first version hit the streets. Over the years, Java performance has improved dramatically, but tuning is essential to get the best results, especially for J2EE applications. You can never have code that runs too fast. Java Peformance Tuning, 2nd edition provides a comprehensive and indispensable guide to eliminating all types of performance problems. Using many real-life examples to work through the tuning process in detail, JPT shows how tricks such as minimizing object creation and replacing strings with arrays can really pay off in improving your code's performance. Tuning J2EE applications bears many similarities to tuning J2SE apps, but important and specific considerations apply. For this reason, Java Performance Tuning, Second Edition includes four new chapters: a new chapter on J2EE application tuning in general followed by chapters on tuning JDBC, servlets and JSPs, and EJBs. Java Performance Tuning offers common-sense advice about what to tune and what to leave alone, emphasizing techniques that provide big performance gains with minimal code restructuring. It gives you crucial guidance that helps you tune without destroying your program's architecture. Blindly changing things in an effort to make a program run faster is a great way to create buggy, unmaintainable code. Java Performance Tuning teaches you to work efficiently and effectively, resulting in code that is robust, maintainable, and fast. Java Performance Tuning, Second Edition shows you how to:

Create a performance plan
Glean information about your program's behavior from profiling tools
Identify bottlenecks before tuning
Minimize the number of objects your program creates, particularly critical for J2EE applications
Optimize the use of strings
Avoid performance penalties from inefficient code
Improve the behavior of loops and switches
Optimize I/O behavior
Use appropriate algorithms for sorting and other common tasks
Use threads effectively
Optimize the performance of distributed systems
Speed up servlets and JSPs
Structure JDBC usage efficiently
Use effective design patterns to optimize EJB performance

Covers JDK 1.4

Customer Reviews:

Ups and Downs, but generally down.......2007-05-19

The book covers a wide range of topics with some decent, but out-dated examples. As a collective whole, this writing will get you thinking. However, some suggestions provided are impractical and simply not effective enough to warrant implementation. Providing pros and cons in the majority of examples provides some jewels of information and things to think about, but it does not live up to the massive amount of difficult, wordy reading involved or the overly verbose samples.

I was able to take some things away from this book, but not nearly enough to warrant recommending it.

Sorry guys, it's a dud.

Authoritative and practical, but not for everyone.......2007-01-26

If you are a core Java developer/architect who does performance tuning on a regular basis this should be part of your library.

Over time, this has been the most useful of the dozen or so performance books I own. It's scope is narrow - core Java tuning and it skates over the distributed computing smells that seem to be the most common cause of hot spots in today's Java apps. The author isn't afraid to describe unorthodox or ugly tricks when they can bear fruit. The custom Class object that seemed to offend some reviewers helped me track down a gnarly memory issue in an app that was too bloated for OptimizeIt to be practical. Doing the "wrong thing" to get the "right result" can be the essence of pragmatism. The section on StringTokenizer implementation is a great example of unpicking a typical performance issue from inappropriate use of a general purpose class.

Performance tuning is a specialty that demands pragmatism, confidence, persistence, creativity and a high tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. I suspect that only a minority of the population of competent developers have the necessary assortment of personailty quirks to be effective performance engineers. Black and white thinking, sometimes a trait of smart developers, is a disaster for performance engineering.

A report from the field..........2005-11-24

... or "You had a whole SECOND to reply? In MY day..."

First: if you are not a 'hardcore' Java programmer: do not bother with the rest of this review, and do not buy this book until you reach that point. It won't help enough to offset the damage it causes.

That said, a bit of context: the project I was working on that inspired me to buy a copy of this book involved a telecom system that had to handle hundreds of transactions a second, with sub-second response times (yes, in Java). Not the biggest system, or the fastest, but definitely not "fancy GUI code", by any stretch of the imagination.

Don't buy this book to learn how to use an optimizer; it isn't a beginner's guide. After buying it, I only ended up using perhaps two of the items covered in the book, while working on the project. But those two points were things that the several hundred collective years of development experience on the project had missed, and every other topic in the book warranted at least the question "did we check for this?"

It is difficult to categorize the audience of this book; it is in the odd position of needing to be far too heavy on theory and detailed explanation to be a "cookbook", for it to be of any use, but it also has to cover topics so diverse that it is unlikely that more than a handful will ever apply to any single situation, so it isn't really a "how to" book, either.

So why did I give this book four stars? Because a different set of points in the book applied on the next project I had to work on. But those 4 stars with a warning: for the audience and topics that it covers, this book it is *very* good, and for anything or anyone else, it will be, at best, nonsense; at worst, using it can be actively counterproductive (as another reviewer noted, several of the things the author covers are not for the faint of heart, and for very good reasonss).

It failed to earn five stars for two reasons: first, while the author has a clear grasp of his material, his grasp of the audience seems to be hazy at times. Like the marketing of the book itself, he seems to have trouble deciding whether his audience is experts looking for that one golden tweak, or novices (who, in this case, should look for a more introductory book on profiling and optimization in general, or the tools they have available, in specific).

The second reason is not a problem with the material itself, just the passage of time - this edition predates the release of the Tiger version (of Java, not Mac OS X), and thus does not cover it. However, anyone attempting to use this book to work with Tiger should, in my opinion, strongly reconsider doing so; while the fundamentals of how to do the analysis remain the same, the details of several of the issues the author discusses are *completely* changed in Tiger.

Provides ideas on tactical optimization for performance gain.......2005-11-03

This book provides good ideas on tactical optimization for performance gain but could have also covered architectural patterns and process for performance optimization.
This book covers the areas of optimizing compilers, I/O, RAM footprint, small object management and deployment etc.

Next edition may also cover architectural decisions (or patterns) which are costly to reverse later. Also, coverage on processes for performance optimization will be great in next edition. Getting a program to run faster costs money, and thus this business decision should have process ( or guidelines for series of high level actions ) to facilitate the optimization.

Other things, I would like to cover in next edition are
1) How to choose between "speed up the slow things" or "do the slow things less often".
2) How to identify ACTUAL areas of improvement. i.e. Importance of automated run that reasonably simulates the program under its usual conditions. (Example, our test on performance gave excellent results. But European customers rejected the product because we had not simulated ocean hop of packets as 2 databases were in America. Or importance of using a multi-user simulation system to identify real problems i.e. transaction interactions etc).
3) Importance of cohesive, loosely coupled and well factored modules for behaviour-preserving transformations of performance.
4) Importance of measurement before starting optimization.

Anyway, great book.

Substantial and comprehensive text.......2005-09-03

(...)
This is a substantial and comprehensive text on many aspects of Java Performance characteristics, explaining the effects of Java design and coding practices, and giving advice to help the Java Programmer design, code, and optimize applications to execute efficiently. It is not a programming tutorial for the novice, but will enhance the knowledge of an experienced programmer for Java specific concepts. Its goal is to explain how to tune existing programs to improve efficiency, but the explanation of the underlying Java Virtual Machine and the details of compiler code generation are so revealing that any developer will gain valuable insight into smart Java programming design.

The book consists of 537 pages divided into 19 chapters and is quite easy to understand for readers who have programming experience. Each chapter ends with a performance checklist section to summarize what you need to do with regard to that chapter's illumination.

The clearly organized chapters permit you to selectively read any of interest because they are mostly independent subjects. You can read a chapter on Strings and learn all about how these objects are implemented and the ramifications of various usages. It also addresses some algorithmic issues, such as sorting, garbage collection, and threading. I thought many of the revelations of code generation and object storage will seem obvious to programmers who have experience looking at generated code in other languages which will make for fast reading.

The very comprehensive nature of the book provides valuable information for all Java developers, and yet is helpful for just a quick understanding of particular Java issues. I enjoyed just reading through some of the chapters to confirm or enhance my understanding of particular execution characteristics.

(...)

I rate this book 4 out of 5 for programmers with Java experience.

Note: this book has nothing to do with Java Scripts.

Sun Java System Directory Server 5.2 2005q1: Performance Tuning Guide

Average customer rating:

Sun Java System Directory Server 5.2 2005q1: Performance Tuning Guide
Sun Microsystems Inc.
Manufacturer: Iuniverse Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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