How Ian started publishing with O'Reilly

This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club.
http://gotopia.tech/bookclub

Ian F. Darwin - Java, Android & Unix Developer, Trainer, Mentor & Author of "Java Cookbook"
Jeanne Boyarsky - Oracle Java Champion, Co-Author of "Real-World Java" & "OCP 21 Java Cert Book"

Check out more here:
https://gotopia.tech/episodes/438

RESOURCES
Ian
https://fosstodon.org/@IanDarwin
https://x.com/Ian_Darwin
https://github.com/IanDarwin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/idarwin
https://www.darwinsys.com

Jeanne
https://bsky.app/profile/jeanneboyarsky.bsky.social
https://mastodon.social/@jeanneboyarsky
https://x.com/jeanneboyarsky
https://github.com/boyarsky
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanne-boyarsky
https://sites.google.com/view/jeanneboyarsky
https://www.selikoff.net

Links
https://javacookbook.org
https://dev.java/community/jcs

DESCRIPTION
In this GOTO Book Club, Java Champion Jeanne Boyarsky interviews Ian F. Darwin — author of one of Java's most enduring reference books, Java Cookbook, now in its fifth edition covering up to Java 25. The conversation traces Ian's extraordinary journey: from writing Java's first commercial training course outside of Sun Microsystems, to meeting Tim O'Reilly at a Unix conference and handing him a chapter on lint, to delivering a class in Houston where the entire room had just been laid off and were using the course as their golden handshake into a new career. Ian talks about the philosophy behind the book — culling a peak 900-page beast down to a tight 600 pages, anchoring tool choices on proven, battle-tested picks like JUnit, Mockito, and logging — and shares his three favourite chapters: Regular Expressions, Object-Oriented Techniques, and Reflection.

The conversation gets sharply honest about AI and the future of the industry. Ian — who uses Claude as his coding assistant and does vibe code — warns that his greatest fear isn't AI taking over the world, but something subtler and more dangerous: companies stopping junior hires because AI can do the work, leaving no one to grow into the deep expertise that retires with the current generation. The parallel risk for books is equally candid: AI was trained on older editions, so the fifth edition is genuinely new and un-scraped territory.

His advice for anyone who has learned the basics of Java?
Don't ask an AI — buy the cookbook, save yourself years of trial and error, and for goodness' sake, read the code before you deploy it. "It's like building an airplane and putting passengers on it without flight testing."

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Ian F. Darwin • Java Cookbook 5th ed. • https://amzn.to/3QH0NZy
Ian F. Darwin • Java Cookbook 1st ed. • https://amzn.to/4sUpPlL
Ian F. Darwin • Checking C Programs with Lint • https://amzn.to/3Q2C69Y
Victor Grazi & Jeanne Boyarsky • Real-World Java • https://amzn.to/4oCEeBR
Jeanne Boyarsky & Scott Selikoff • OCP 21 Java Cert Book • https://amzn.to/4lF8OIC

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