Java Virtual Machine (Java Series)

I know of only one book that covers the JVM and the binary codes, the classfile format etc. It is known as the goldfish bowl book because of its cover, but is officially called The Java Virtual Machine. The book is frustrating because it spends so much time with the irrelevant Jasmin assembler and its syntax. You are interested in generating byte codes directly, not assembler. It leaves out much you must discover by experiment looking at generated class files, such as whether offsets are signed or absolute, where the base is etc. In its next revision, it should set the Jasmin aside in an appendix, and include examples and more precise documentation on the binary formats. The book is still valuable because it gives a fair bit of background exposition you will not find in the vmspec itself. You would use this book to understand the VM, then the vmspec to actually write code that generated or modified class files.

Recently started reading it and so far really like the author's thoughts. Jasmin is an assembler which was included to help in writing class files.I'll update my review as reading continues, so far so good. Comparing it to other books I've perused on similar topics, I like how this author dishes the good and the bad, he doesn't just sell you the JVM like it's a piece of real estate or a car.

Although there are only a few books currently discussing about the internal of JVM, this book is the worst of them. It copies too many pages such as the bytecode semantics from the JVM specification by Sun Microsystems and these parts consume around half of the books. Also most contents not borrowed from JVM specification is far too simple to be an indepth discussion of JVM. It only took me 2 hours to read the whole book and to find out that it is a bad book.

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