The new features introduced in Java 8 were designed together to facilitate development of more expressive and parallel-friendly libraries.
Lambda expressions reduce the syntactic overhead of encoding behavior as data; default methods allow existing libraries to evolve over time, enabling core JDK classes such as Collections to take advantage of lambda expressions; the java.util.stream package leverages these language features to offer rich aggregate operations on collections, arrays, and other data sources in a declarative, expressive, and parallel-friendly manner.
All of this adds up to more powerful and performant code, as well as a more pleasant programming experience.
This book not only provides lots of examples of how to use these new features, but offers readers a peek into the underlying principles behind their design, and why they result in better code. Let Venkat be your guide to this new and improved Java—you’re in for a treat.