By now, you have learned the most important areas and topics needed for a professional Java developer. What we still have ahead of us in this book is to discuss some topics that will lead you from being a junior developer to a senior developer. Reading this chapter will not make anyone a senior developer, though. The previous chapters were the roads that we walked through. This chapter is only the map. If each of the previous chapters covered a short walk of a few miles in the journey of coding to reach the harbor, then this chapter is the nautical map to discover a new continent.

We will briefly bite into some very deep and high-level professional areas, such as creating a Java agent, compile-time annotation processing, polyglot programming, a bit of architecture design and tools, and techniques to work in teams. We'll do it just for the taste. Now, you have enough knowledge to understand the importance of these topics, and getting...