Conclusions

The material in this book was informed by my own work experience designing systems and writing software for artificial intelligence and information processing. If you enjoyed reading this book and you make practical use of at least some of the material I covered, then I consider my effort to be worthwhile.

Writing software is a combination of a business activity, promoting good for society, and an exploration to try out new ideas for self improvement. I believe that there is sometimes a fine line between spending too many resources tracking many new technologies versus getting stuck using old technologies at the expense of lost opportunities. My hope is that reading this book was an efficient and pleasurable use of your time, letting you try some new techniques and technologies that you had not considered before.

When we do expend resources to try new things it is almost always best to perform many small experiments and then dig deeper into areas that have a good chance of providing high value and capturing your interest.

Fail fast is a common meme but failure that we do not learn from is a waste.

I have been using the Java platform from the very beginning and although I also use many other programming languages in my work and studies, both the Java language and the Java platform provide high efficiency, scalability, many well-trained developers, and a wealth of existing infrastructure software and libraries. Investment in Java development also pays when using alternative JVM languages like JRuby, Scala, and Clojure.

If we never get to meet in person or talk on the telephone, then I would like to thank you now for taking the time to read my book.