Topics covered:

• Best practices and tips for Java
• Creating and destroying objects (static factory methods, singletons, avoiding duplicate objects and finalizers)
• Required methods for custom classes (overriding equals(), hashCode(), toString(), clone(), and compareTo() properly)
• Hints
  for class and interface design (minimizing class and member
  accessibility, immutability, composition versus inheritance, interfaces
  versus abstract classes, preventing subclassing, static versus
  nonstatic classes)
• C constructs in Java (structures, unions, enumerated types, and function pointers in Java)
• Tips
  for designing methods (parameter validation, defensive copies, method
  signatures, method overloading, zero-length arrays, hints for Javadoc
  comments)
• General programming advice (local variable scope, using Java API libraries, avoiding float and double for exact comparisons, when to avoid strings, string concatenation,
  interfaces and reflection, avoid native methods, optimizing hints,
  naming conventions)
• Programming with exceptions (checked
  versus run-time exceptions, standard exceptions, documenting
  exceptions, failure-capture information, failure atomicity)
• Threading and multitasking (synchronization and scheduling hints, thread safety, avoiding thread groups)
• Serialization (when to implement Serializable, the readObject(), and readResolve() methods)