Previously he was a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he was an architect in the Core Java Platform Group. He wrote the bestselling book Effective Java (Addison-Wesley, 2001), winner of the 2002 Jolt Award. He led the design and implementation of many parts of the Java platform, including the collections framework, Tiger language enhancements (JSR-201), annotations (JSR-175), multiprecision arithmetic, preferences (JSR-10), and assertions (JSR-41). Previously he was a senior systems designer at Transarc Corporation, where he designed and implemented many parts of the Encina distributed transaction processing system. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. in computer science from Columbia University.