ABOUT THE AUTHOR Effective Java Programming Language Guide by Joshua Bloch Foreword by Guy Steele

Joshua Bloch is a Senior Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems, Inc., where he is an architect in the Core Java Platform Group. He designed, implemented, and maintained many parts of the Java platform, including the award-winning Java Collections Framework, the assert construct, and the java.math package. He led the JCP expert groups for Assertions (JSR-14), Preferences (JSR-10), and Metadata (JSR-175). Previously he was a Senior Systems Designer at Transarc Corporation, where he designed and implemented many parts of the Encina distributed transaction processing system.

In addition to Effective Java Programming Language Guide, Bloch wrote chapters in The Java Tutorial Continued and Camelot and Avalon - A Distributed Transaction Facility. He has also written a handful of technical papers.

He holds a B.S. from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University. His Ph.D. thesis on the replication of abstract data objects was nominated for the ACM Distinguished Dissertation Award.