Having a knowledge of design patterns enables you, as a developer, to improve your code base, promote code reuse, and make the architecture more robust. As languages evolve, new features take time to fully understand before they are adopted en masse. The mission of this book is to ease the adoption of the latest trends and provide good practices for programmers. We focus on showing you the practical aspects of smarter coding in Java. We'll start off by going over object-oriented (OOP) and functional programming (FP) paradigms, moving on to describe the most frequently used design patterns in their classical format and explain how Java’s functional programming features are changing them. You will learn to enhance implementations by mixing OOP and FP, and finally get to know about the reactive programming model, where FP and OOP are used in conjunction with a view to writing better code. Gradually, the book will show you the latest trends in architecture, moving from MVC to microservices and serverless architecture. We will finish off by highlighting the new Java features and best practices. By the end of the book, you will be able to efficiently address common problems faced while developing applications and be comfortable working on scalable and maintainable projects of any size.