Top 10 Free Java Programming Books, EBooks and PDF for Beginners and Experienced Programmers

Who doesn't like free stuff? Well, I do like and many Java programmers like me simply love free Java books, eBooks, and PDFs. Fortunately, the Internet is full of free books and eBooks but unfortunately, many of them are of not good quality. Most of the eBooks which are freely available either are sample chapters of popular Java programming books or they are simply old and out-of-date. In my last article, I have shared a lot of such books and the feedback was that most of them, even though they are good in the past, have simply not up to the mark. The search goes on and while browsing the net a couple of days back I hit the jackpot when I found these free Java books from O'Reilly.

Also, unlike most of the books, these free Java books are good, up-to-date and cover the latest technologies like Java 8, MicroServices, Docker, Java EE, Functional Programming, and Core Java.

All these books are available for free download in ePub, Mobi, and PDF format. I have all of these books sitting now on my iPad Air so that I can read them while traveling. The books are both clear and concise and give you enough information to start with the topic.

Btw, if you prefer online courses over books, which I am doing nowadays, you can also check out my previous articles about free courses from Udemy and Pluralsight to learn Spring, Java 9, SQL, Linux, Jenkins, JUnit, Oracle, and other technologies.

I like to curate and share free stuff and if you are interested in a regular update, you should also join our Facebook channel about Free Programming Books and Courses, every day we share free online courses and legitimate free books there.

Top 8 Free Java Programming Books

So, without wasting any more time, here are the links to some of the best free Java programming books for Java and JEE programmers. Start with Java 8 and then you can move on with more books. Since, I love books and always looking for genuine good free eBooks, bookmark these pages for more updates and books coming in the future.

1. Java Notes for Professional eBook

Author: StackOverflow Answers

Download - https://goalkicker.com/JavaBook/

Description: This is one of the best and most comprehensive free eBook you can find online to learn Java. This book is created by combining StackOverflow answers on Java topics, which means its content is contributed by experts. 

This book has more than 140 chapters and it cover all core Java and advanced Java topics notably

1. Core Java concepts like type conversion and getter and setter

2. Threads

3. Collections

4. Generics

5. Enum

6. Serialization

7. String 

8. Date and Time classes

9. Bit manipulation

10. JVM 

11. JSON Parsing

12. XML Parsing

13. REST API with Java

14. Logging

15. Reflection

If you want to learn Java then I highly recommend this free eBook.  The book is nicely formatted in PDF format and you can download it for FREE. 

2. Grokking the Java Interview (Sample PDF)

Author : Javin Paul

Download - https://javinpaul.gumroad.com/l/HMOAv

Description: This is a free sample of my best selling "Grokking the Java Interview Book". It contains more than 50 pages and it got many questions which is worth looking before you go for any Java Interview.  

I created this book so that you can see what you will get into full version but this quickly become the most downloaded eBook on Java on Gumroad as it provide a lot of value for free. I highly recommend you to checkout the book for Java Interview preparation. 

And, if you like, you can also checkout full book and use friends30 code to get 30% discount. 

3. Introducing Java 8

Author: by Raoul-Gabriel Urma
Download: http://www.oreilly.com/programming/free/introducing-java-8.csp
Description:
The Java SE 8 release is perhaps the largest change to Java in its history, led by its flagship feature - lambda expressions.

If you’re an experienced developer looking to adopt Java 8 at work, this short guide will walk you through all of the major changes before taking a deep dive into lambda expressions and Java 8’s other big feature: the Streams API.

Raoul-Gabriel Urma, author of the bestselling book "Java 8 in Action" explains how improved code readability and support for multicore processors were the prime movers behind Java 8 features.

He’ll quickly get you up to speed on new classes including CompleteableFuture and Optional, along with enhanced interfaces and the new Date and Time API. You can download the free eBook from the above link.

4. Microservices for Java Developers

Author: by Christian Posta
Download: http://www.oreilly.com/programming/free/microservices-for-java-developers.csp
Description:  This free Java ebook will teach you whether microservice architecture right for your organization?

These services have many benefits, but they also come with their own set of drawbacks. In this hands-on, example-driven guide, Java developers and architects will learn how to navigate popular application frameworks, such as Dropwizard and Spring Boot, and how to deploy and manage microservices at scale with Linux containers.

You will also learn about popular Spring Boot, Dropwizard, and WildFly Swarm frameworks for designing microservices and Docker and Kubernetes to deploy microservices, regardless of the language.

5. Object-Oriented vs. Functional Programming

Author: by Richard Warburton
Download: http://www.oreilly.com/programming/free/object-oriented-vs-functional-programming.csp
Description:
In this free Java 8 book, you will learn how lambdas make OOP languages better suited for dealing with parallelism and concurrency and understand how five OOP basic principles of programming map to functional languages and paradigms.

You will also learn some of the most common OOP design patterns and how they exist in the functional world.

Famous Java technologist Richard Warburton, the author of Java 8 Lambdas, discusses similarities between these programming paradigms and points out that both FP and OOP are actually moving closer toward one another. One prominent example is the use of lambda expressions in Java and other OOP languages such as C#, C++, and Swift.

6. Modern Java EE Design Patterns

Author: by Markus Eisele
Download: http://www.oreilly.com/programming/free/modern-java-ee-design-patterns.csp
Description:
If you’re part of an enterprise development team investigating the use of microservices with Java EE, this book will help you understand the challenges of starting a greenfield development vs tearing apart an existing brownfield application into services.

It will also help you to examine your business domain to see if microservices would be a good fit or not and explore best practices for automation, high availability, data separation, and performance.

Most importantly you will inspect design patterns such as aggregator, proxy, pipeline, or shared resources to model service interactions

7. Java: The Legend

Author: by Benjamin Evans
Download: http://www.oreilly.com/programming/free/java-the-legend.csp
Description:
The road from Java's first public alpha of 1.0 to today has been long—and full of technical advances, innovative solutions, and interesting complications. Along the way, Java has flourished and is now one of the world's most important and widely-used programming environments.

Benjamin Evans, the Java editor for InfoQ and author of Java in a Nutshell, 6th edition, takes us on a journey through time about how Java has benefitted from early design decisions, including "Write Once, Run Anywhere" and an insistence on backward compatibility help it to survive and remain at top in last 20 years.

A very good read for seasoned Java developers and that too free of cost.

8. Docker for Java Developers

Author: by Arun Gupta
Download: http://www.oreilly.com/programming/free/docker-for-java-developers.csp
Description:
The standard way to deploy Java applications requires you to install the Java Development Kit (JDK), plus an application server, web server, database, and other components in a data center, whether on-premise or in the cloud.

Though this process works well enough, Docker containers can save you many headaches when it comes to packaging, deploying, and scaling your applications. Btw, if you like course, here is a free course to learn Docker for Java developers, a hands-on guide.

In this free Java eBook, Arun Gupta, author of best-selling book Minecraft Modding with Forge: A Family-Friendly Guide to Building Fun Mods in Java explains Docker's basic concepts and the commonly used orchestration frameworks around them.

You’ll learn how to achieve faster startup and deployments on both Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and understand how these containers improve portability across machines and reduce the impedance mismatch between development, testing, and production environments.

9. RESTful Web Services

Author: by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby
Download:
Description: http://restfulwebapis.org/rws.html
RESTful Web Services is a 2007 book by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby. It was the first book-length treatment of RESTful design and the predecessor to RESTful Web APIs. RESTful Web APIs were designed as a complete replacement for RESTful Web Services, and in our opinion, there's no longer any need to buy RESTful Web Services.

The authors and publishers have agreed to make RESTful Web Services freely available and you can either read it online for free or download as .pdf, .epub, .mobi, or .daisy format for offline reading.

10. Learning Java

Author: By Patrick Niemeyer and Daniel Leuck
Read Online: http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000001805
Description:
This book was published in 2013 and still a good book to learn Java, the most popular programming language.  Java is the preferred language for many of today’s leading-edge technologies-everything from smartphones and game consoles to robots, massive enterprise systems, and supercomputers.

If you’re new to Java, the fourth edition of this bestselling guide provides an example-driven introduction to the latest language features and APIs in Java 6 and 7.

Advanced Java developers will be able to take a deep dive into areas such as concurrency and JVM enhancements. The book is free for online reading but you can also buy an eBook from the author.


That's all about some of the best free Java programming books and PDFs for Java/JEE developers. We should be really thankful to O'Reilly for providing such quality content free of cost. 

If you have got any free Java eBooks or books, which have been made free by their author and publisher then please share with us. I will include that in this list and hopefully, all Java programmers can find these good books in one place.

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Thanks for reading this tutorial. If you like these books then please share with your friends and colleagues. If you have any feedback, comment or any free book to add to this list, then please drop a comment.

And lastly one question for you? What is your favorite Java book? Effective Java, Head First Java, or Java Concurrency in Practice?