In the 9 years of running Baeldung, we've never been through anything like this pandemic

And, if making my courses more affordable for a while is going to help you stay in business, land a new job, make rent or be able to provide for your family - then it's well worth doing.

Effective immediately, all Baeldung courses are 33% off their normal prices!

You'll find all three courses in the menu, above.

In the 9 years of running Baeldung, we've never been through anything like this pandemic

And, if making my courses more affordable for a while is going to help you stay in business, land a new job, make rent or be able to provide for your family - then it's well worth doing.

Effective immediately, all Baeldung courses are 33% off their normal prices!

You'll find all three courses in the menu, above.

At the very beginning of last year, I decided to track my reading habits and share the best stuff here, on Baeldung. Haven't missed a review since.

Here we go…

1. Spring and Java

Vlad's book is half-way done and, if the chapter on transactions is any indication – will be a fantastic writeup.

He's publishing it via Leanpub, with flexible (and way to low) pricing, so if you want to really brush up on your SQL game, definitely pick that up.

I don't do a lot of product recommendation around here (this is literally the first in almost two years), but having a solid base with low level persistence is critical, and this is a great way to build up that base.

And still on persistence – here's a great set of important tactics and recommendations to follow when working with Hibernate.

A quick look at how the old @Deprecated annotation might be improved and how that would look like in practice.

For years, benchmarking has been really complex (while looking really simple). There's some interesting stuff coming in JDK9 that will make things a little bit easier.

But just a little bit – good benchmarking will still be hard.

Like always, solid notes by Nicolai, discussing modularity in the upcoming JDK release.

Also worth reading:

Webinars and presentations:

Time to upgrade:

2. Technical and Musings

A company that is enabling their developers to work with new, solid hardware and new(ish) language versions has a distinct market advantage.

That's both a general, logical observation as well as a personal tactic I used the last time I interviewed for a job. I literally took a walk through the office right after the interview, paid attention to what hardware people were using, and excluded a couple of companies that otherwise looked interesting based on that.

Technical – also worth reading:

Musings – also worth reading:

3. Comics

And my favorite Dilberts of the week:

4. Pick of the Week