Essential Java Tips and Tricks for Programmers

Before attempting to learn any language, it is necessary to understand the basics, and keep the concepts clear. In this post, we will see a few tips and tricks that will help java enthusiasts.

• Understand the difference between an array and an arraylist clearly- Data structures play an important role since they decide how data will be stored, how it will be accessed, manipulated, and finally shown to the user.

• Using strings carefully - One should be clear with the concept of strings, and how they work when different symbols are used with it, whether it is a single string or an array of string.

• Know how try works, and how finally can’t be used with the ‘try’ block- It is important to know the working of exceptions, how they are tried, and caught, and relevant messages are displayed on the console depending on the exception.

• Instead of returning Null object, return empty collections- It is clean, and preferable to return empty collections or data structures, instead of null, since empty collections can be populated much easily in comparison to manipulating nulls.

• Avoid memory leaks - This just leads to wastage of memory, that can’t even be used. Hence, they need to be avoided.

• Avoid deadlocks − Depending on a resource that in turn depends on the previous resource leads to deadlocks, meaning there is no way to come out of it, other than terminate it. It is important to backtrack the issue and understand what situations can create deadlocks and avoid them.

• Null pointer exception - This causes the program to exit indefinitely. Hence, if important code is being run, and the code terminates indefinitely, it would lead to loss of previously computed data.

• Proper usage of regex and in relevant places only- It is important to know when to use regular expressions, and when to use simple conditions. Overly complicated regular expressions lead to nothing but confusion.