A study of Java antipatterns, Bitter Java combines rare readability with strong technical content. It is aimed at beginning to intermediate programmers, and identifies common problems, or antipatterns, which cause server-side Java applications to fail or perform badly. Despite their Java focus, many of the tips apply equally to any language or platform. This is no surprise, since one of the author"s themes is that programmers bring previous bad habits into Java development and discover that despite its advantages it is by no means a cure-all. There is even a chapter on Java memory leaks, including a technical discussion of how garbage collection works. Even so Bitter Java is not a negative book. Rather than just pointing out pitfalls it presents a solution for each antipattern. The idea is to learn from the mistakes of others, always an appealing prospect. The author is ex-IBM and packs in plenty of real-world experiences, and spices the text with anecdotes from his kayaking adventures. An example Internet bulletin board application provides a unifying theme for the book. Topics covered include Servlet and JSP design, JDBC database programming, use of the model-view-controller pattern, enhancing performance with caching and connection pooling, appropriate use of EJBs, and improving the development process. Some of the solutions are simply common sense, while other recurrent themes are refactoring, searching for suitable design patterns, extreme programming, and applying sound coding standards. The author comes over as a tiny bit smug on occasion, but with this excellent set of tips and insights, perhaps he has good reason. --Tim Anderson