For starters, Guava is a project which contains many Google's core libraries like collections, caching, math, primitives, concurrency, networking, common annotations, string processing, I/O, refelction and many others.
Guava follows almost all the excellent patterns and practices mentioned in Effective Java book written by Joshua Bloch, who has designed the impeccable Java Collections API while he was at Sun. Later he joined Google. Under his mentor-ship, Google Guava got wings and became a very well designed and effective API, useful for many situations and scenarios with an ever-growing feature list. I ensure I add Guava dependency as the first thing to my Gradle or Maven build script. Guava makes Java code a lot more readable, clean, simple and elegant. It utilises the Java generics very well.
It is very well designed API. Guava is designed, implemented and maintained by Google Engineers like Kevin Bourrillion and Kurt Alfred Kluever, etc.
Consider the following example which I tweeted few months back.
Which of the above versions looks fine? Obviously the second option, aint it?
There are many such examples where Guava wins by a margin compared to normal Java code and or other libraries like commons, etc.
Guava also helps for [in a way] functional programming too. There are few options which are really helpful there as well. Having said that, Guava creators implore the developers not to litter code with too much functional programming which might lead to unreadable code.
I will start with writing few posts on Google Guava with the tag, "LearningGuava". I have been using Guava extensively in almost every project of mine since few years. This will not only help some one else looking for info or starting on Google Guava, but as well as for me also so that I will remember in future if I need any quick snippet on something specific with Guava usage. That being the motivation, I hope it will be of good experience for you and me as well.
This post will have list of all the posts written for Google Guava. This post kinda serves as an Index and quick reference of my Google Guava posts.
Update on 05th April, 2015: After a fair bit of time here, I have moved on to GitHub hosted Octopress blogs. Please find me on http://P7h.org henceforth for all new updates.
