Professor Richard Jones's second book, The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management has just been published by CRC Press / Chapman and Hall. "Garbage collection" is an essential feature of all modern programming languages. It allows the programmer to use and re-use the computer's memory safely and efficiently, thus eliminating a whole class of bugs.

Written with his colleagues, Tony Hosking (Purdue University) and Eliot Moss (University of Massachusetts), the book addresses new challenges to garbage collection made by recent advances in hardware and software. It explores the consequences of these changes for designers and implementers of high performance garbage collectors. Along with simple and traditional algorithms, the book covers state of the art parallel, incremental, concurrent, and real-time garbage collection.

Richard's first book, Garbage Collection (Wiley, 1996) was a milestone book in the area of automatic memory management. It sold over 8,000 copies, has been cited nearly 1000 times, and translated into Chinese. However, the field has grown considerably since then, sparking a need for an updated look at the latest developments.

By Jessie Ward
Published 11 October 2011
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