I found my way to the JavaOne bookstore, a hub of activity. Who says brick and mortar bookstores are dead? I asked what was hot and got two answers: Hadoop in Practice by Alex Holmes was doing well. And Scala for the Impatient by noted Java Champion Cay Horstmann also seemed to be a fast seller.

Hadoop in Practice
Hadoop is a framework that organizes large clusters of computers around a problem. It is touted as especially effective for large amounts of data, and is use such companies as  Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, eBay and LinkedIn. Hadoop in Practice collects nearly 100 Hadoop examples and presents them in a problem/solution format with step by step explanations of solutions and designs. It’s very much a participatory book intended to make developers more at home with Hadoop.

The author, Alex Holmes, is a senior software engineer with more than 15 years of experience developing large-scale distributed Java systems. For the last four years, he has gained expertise in Hadoop solving Big Data problems across a number of projects. He has presented at JavaOne and Jazoon and is currently a technical lead at VeriSign.

At this year’s JavaOne, he is presenting a session with VeriSign colleague, Karthik Shyamsunder called “Java: A Perfect Platform for Data Science” where they will explain how the Java platform has emerged as a perfect platform for practicing data science, and also talk about such technologies as Hadoop, Hive, Pig, HBase, Cassandra, and Mahout.

Scala for the Impatient
San Jose State University computer science professor and Java Champion Cay Horstmann is the principal author of the highly regarded Core Java. Scala for the Impatient is a basic, practical introduction to Scala for experienced programmers.

Horstmann has a presentation summarizing the themes of his book on at his website.

On the final page he offers an enticing summary of his conclusions:
* Widespread dissatisfaction with Java + XML + IDEs
              --Don't make me eat Elephant again
* A separate language for every problem domain is not efficient
              --It takes time to master the idioms
* ”JavaScript Everywhere” isn't going to scale
* Trend is towards languages with more expressive power, less boilerplate
* Will Scala be the “one ring to rule them”?
* Maybe
             --If it succeeds in industry
             --If student-friendly subsets and tools are created

The popularity of both books echoed comments by IBM Distinguished Engineer Jason McGee who closed his part of the Sunday JavaOne keynote by pointing out that the use of Java in complex applications is increasingly being augmented by a host of other languages with strong communities around them – JavaScript, JRuby, Scala, Python and so forth. Java developers increasingly must know the strengths and weaknesses of such languages going forward.