Google Guava

About

The Google Guava Libraries are a nice set of Java utility classes that will probably come in handy in any project. Immutable collections, string manipulation, handling primitives and easier I/O are some of the concepts they deal with.

Today the the Guava wiki explains most you need to know, but back in the day documentation was quite thin, so I created this page to collect documentation and tips from around the web. I don't follow the topic actively these days, so you may be better off checking out Eugen Baeldung's Guava guides.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Guava or Google in any way. I just think these are some great libraries that every Java project should include in the classpath!

Resources (latest on top)

If you want me to add more resources or have any comments, get in touch.

Added 16.08.20: Bartek Chmielewski has written a guide to Google Guava in Polish:

• Guava - multibiblioteka od Google

Added 29.12.15: Eugen Baeldung updates us on the latest changes in Guava:

• Guava 18: What’s New?

Added 14.02.14: Sezin Karli has done a nice tour of all the Guava basics:

• Prezi presentation on Guava

Added 15.01.14: Level up Lunch features a bunch of Guava examples and one tutorial:

• Filter collection with guava (with screencast), by Justin Musgrove

Added 20.11.13: Kevin Bourrillion guests on the Java Posse podcast to talk about Guava:

• Java Posse #430 - Kevin Bourrillion on Java, Guava and More

Added 21.10.13: Bill Bejeck has written a book about Google Guava:

• The book's homepage

• My review of the book

Added 20.02.12: Kevin Bourrillion does a big tour of Guava at QCon November 2012:

• An Overview of Guava: Google Core Libraries for Java

Added 20.02.12: Stay up to date with Guava development on their Google+ page:

• Google Guava Page on Google+

Added 15.12.12: Another introduction by Mite Mitreski (slide-set and links):

• Google Guava for Cleaner Code

Added 10.12.12: Introduction to Guava by Bhavin Parikh (slide-set):

• Google Guava Introduction

Added 10.07.12: EclipseSource article showing off CacheBuilder/LoadingCache:

• Building lightweight in memory caches with Google Guava

Added 06.06.12: A quick introduction article from EclipseSource:

• Cleaner Code with Guava Optionals and Preconditions

Added 05.06.12: Cyrille Martraire has a series on functional Java with Guava:

• A touch of functional style in plain Java with predicates – Part 1

• A touch of functional style in plain Java with predicates – Part 2

Added 05.06.12: Tom Jefferys discusses String splitting:

• Guava Splitter vs StringUtils

Added 23.12.11: GuavaExplained - The official Guava wiki finally gets some proper content:

• Landing page for Guava explanations

Added 23.12.11: Examples on sorting collections from polygenelubricants:

• Writing more elegant comparison logic with Guava's Ordering

Added 17.11.11: An example from the Guava Concurrency utils, by Bill Bejeck:

• Google Guava – Synchronization with Monitor

Added 19.10.11: An example of using the new Guava EventBus:

• Guava's EventBus - Simple Publisher/Subscriber

Added 19.10.11: How to do Commons Collections stuff with Guava:

• http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/wiki/ApacheCommonCollectionsEquivalents

Added 23.04.11: Presentation from the Guava team about util.concurrent:

• http://guava-libraries.googlecode.com/files/guava-concurrent-slides.pdf

Added 09.02.11: Google Guava vs Apache Commons for arg validation:

• http://piotrjagielski.com/blog/google-guava-vs-apache-commons-for-argument-validation/

Added 22.01.11: Google Guava v07 examples, by Jakub Nabrdalik:

• http://blog.solidcraft.eu/2010/10/googole-guava-v07-examples.html

Added 22.01.11: Kevin Bourrillion presents Guava @NetFlix, 2010-04-26

• http://guava-libraries.googlecode.com/files/Guava_for_Netflix_.pdf

Added 20.01.11: Discussions on StackOverflow of Guava vs Apache Commons:

• What are the big improvements between Guava and Apache equivalent libraries?

• Apache-Commons vs Google-Collections

Added 19.01.11: Read the test source:

• The Google Guava Test sources give some examples of usage.

Original content up to 2010

A five-part, quite extensive tutorial from Sezin Karli:

• Part 1: Fun with string-related stuff

• Part 2: Joys of ordering

• Part 3: Taste the functional programming flavor in Java

• Part 4: Taste the functional programming flavor with predicates

• Part 5: Back to the primitive(s)

Google Guava, the easy parts. A basic tutorial that recently surfaced on DZone:

• http://www.copperykeenclaws.com/googles-guava-java-the-easy-parts/

A collection of short snippets (great mini reference for Google Collections):

• http://blog.publicobject.com/2007/09/series-recap-coding-in-small-with.html

Codemunchies' 4 part series on Google Collections and Guava:

• Part 1: Beautiful code with Google Collections, Guava and static imports

• Part 2: Diving into the Guava library

• Part 3: Functional Java, Filtering and Ordering

• Part 4: Preconditions, MultiMaps, and Partitioning

Another intro to Google Collections:

• http://bwinterberg.blogspot.com/2009/09/introduction-to-google-collections.html

And yet another intro, from JayWay:

• http://blog.jayway.com/2009/10/22/google-collections/

Creating a fluent interface, improving on Google Collections (advanced):

• http://codemonkeyism.com/creating-a-fluent-interface-for-google-collections/

And if you're curious about the whole rationale behind GC, you can watch the whole video from the creators (including comments from Josh Bloch, who created the java.util collections in the first place):

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeO_J2OcHYM

My presentation in 2010

This is my presentation I created about Google Guava back in the day.

You can find the code from this presentation on GitHub.

Page Revision history

18/1 - 2011: Moved resources to this page.

18/6 - 2010: Wrote the original blog post.