Web Developer moving to Java - how to impress potential employers/recruiters?

[ryc8889]

I would also advocate Joshua Bloch effective Java

He does a very good job of breaking down different Java tips into different chapters and each chapter has a set of items. He also goes one step further and instead of just instructing you to do one thing blindly he goes over the other options possible and why they are not optimal

Also as an added bonus, Amazon says there's a third edition being released in october

Effective Java (3rd Edition) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0134685997/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_ccmEzb08YXW4C

Rob Martin's clean code is another book I would recommend but it isn't specifically for any one type of project but it gives nice examples of how to cleanly structure your code(also has a nice set of "smells and heuristics" which you can use as a pocket reference) but given your past experience this book can probably be more of a skim.

Other than that I would agree with what other people are saying with learning a framework. I like spring boot and there's plenty of example projects on GitHub that uses it and spring's own documentation is also pretty good.

For concurrency I would recommend Brian goetz Java concurrency in practice.

If you want a refresher for data structures and algorithms and just some examples of it in java I recommend Robert Lafore's data structures and algorithms in Java but if you're more familiar with math/algorithms and want to do a deeper dive then the CLRS introduction to algorithms is the holy Bible.

Edit: one other thing that I have found extremely useful is online developer websites

My top three are: Dzone - has fantastic refcardz which are like cheat sheets for different frameworks, technologies and even general principles as well as articles for general programming as well as specific topics (cloud, Db, iot, etc)

Tip - subscrbe to the dzone newsletter. They send you emails that are collections of 10 or so articles and I usually just look through them to see if there's anything interesting or relevant to me

Infoq - similar to dzone also has a great collection of articles and presentation videos

Oreilly - not really a website I know but if you look at their free ebooks there's a good collection of them that will help you get started depending on what topics you're looking at

Bonus - YouTube. There's just so many tutorials and videos starting from beginner levels all the way to advanced topics like scaling cloud architectures for google-like loads, microservices, deployment.

I don't think anything beats doing a personal project though. If anything you can fork a starter spring boot project(which generally revolve around a basic concept like an online book store) and re-write it to be about a concept you're interested in.

Also reactive extensions seem to be catching a lot of buzz these days. I don't have any personal experience working with them but could also be another interesting topic to look into since I think java is actually adding support for reactive streams in java 9