I was stumbling around Quora two days ago, and I came across a blog link which I wish I could see earlier. It’s a list of 10 articles that every programmer must read. This includes articles on unicode, networking, time, floating point arithmetic, security, SEO, URL encoding, memory and more.

So, I must share some important lessons that I’ve learned from these articles:

The misunderstood Unicode

  • Unicode is neither just another character set of 16bits, nor it’s just limited to 65,536 characters.
  • In fact, Unicode is a character representation & encoding technique, which can represent more than a million (1,114,111) different characters.
  • Still, only 10% of this 1,114,111 positions are used.

Java String Class — The God Class.

  • The String class is an immutable final.
  • Every string literal in Java is stored in a special string pool in memory. Every time we create a new String object using a string literal, it will search in the pool if it already exists, and will return a reference to that string.
  • String pool is not always cleared from the memory, so it’s unsafe to store sensitive information there.
  • Java doesn’t support Operator Overloading, but the String is the only class that has an implementation of the “+” operator for concatenation of strings.

Relativity Theory and GPS Satellites

Seeing a real life application of relativity theory for the first time: “The frequency of a remote clock relative to an observer is affected by velocity and gravity. The clocks inside GPS satellites are adjusted for relativistic effects.”

Go! Read Them All!

So, if you feel like reading the articles, here’s the link :http://javarevisited.blogspot.in/2014/05/10-articles-every-programmer-must-read.html

Bonus: Another 10 articles : https://coderwall.com/p/vmsa0g