While taking a short breather in my continuing Java series, I think that now is a good time to reiterate my advice for all Domino developers to read Effective Java. It's probably not the best way to learn Java from scratch, but it's an invaluable tour through tons of important Java concepts. Even if you don't use most of the knowledge immediately, reading every section will help immerse you in the language and give you a better appreciation for its texture, which is one of the most important aspects of being a better programmer.

There is one caveat, though, when it comes to serialization. The serialization chapter in the book, though characteristically thorough and accurate, paints a much more dire and complicated picture of serialization than we as XPages developers usually have to worry about. It focuses on long-term storage of serialized objects - say, on the filesystem as a data format - whereas most of it going on in an XPages app is to make sure that your managed beans and data contexts don't throw exceptions when you do a partial refresh. Though we do run into it a bit when storing Java objects in Domino documents with MIMEBean or ODA, a managed bean class can get away with just "implements Serializable" attached and not a second thought.

Now go, make haste to Amazon and purchase the book!