Author, Speaker, Entrepreneur, PhD
DR RAOUL-GABRIEL URMA
About
Dr Raoul-Gabriel Urma is the CEO and Founder of Cambridge Spark, a leading learning organisation for data scientists and developers. In particular, Cambridge Spark has developed K.A.T.E.®, a proprietary AI-powered learning and assessment platform for Data Science, with the support of the UK innovation agency (£1.4million funding). He also founded and runs Cambridge Coding Academy, a growing community of young coders and pre-university students.
He is author of several programming books, including the best-seller “Modern Java in Action: lambdas, streams, functional and reactive programming” which sold over 30,000 copies globally and with a second edition published in November 2018 as well as “Real-World Software Development” published in December 2019.
Raoul holds a PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge University as well as a MEng in Computer Science from Imperial College London and graduated with first-class honours, having won several prizes for technical innovation. His research interests lie in the area of programming languages, compilers, source code analysis, machine learning and education.
He was nominated an Oracle Java Champion in 2017. He is also an international speaker having delivered over 100 talks covering Emerging Technologies, Entrepreneurship, Java and Python. Raoul has advised and worked for several organisations on large-scale software engineering projects including at Google, Oracle, eBay and Goldman Sachs.
You can find Raoul’s profile on linkedin if you’d like to connect for collaboration, business opportunities or speaking engagements.


Books
Real-world Software Development
I wrote a new book with my friend Richard Warburton published in December 2019. The book is entitled Real-world Software Development: A Project-Driven Guide to Fundamentals in Java.
Explore the latest Java-based software development techniques and methodologies through the project-based approach in this practical guide. Unlike books that use abstract examples and lots of theory, Real-World Software Development shows you how to develop several relevant projects while learning best practices along the way.
Modern Java in Action
Modern Java in Action, released in November 2018, is the second edition of my best-selling book Java 8 in Action: Lambdas, streams and functional-style programming.
As of December 2018 it has sold 30,000+ copies world wide.
Modern Java in Action connects new features of the Java language with their practical applications. Using crystal-clear examples and careful attention to detail, this book respects your time. It will help you expand your existing knowledge of core Java as you master modern additions like the Streams API and the Java Module System, explore new approaches to concurrency, and learn how functional concepts can help you write code that’s easier to read and maintain.
You can order it on the publisher website.
Java 8 in Action
This is my first book, Java 8 in Action, published in 2014. It is a clearly written guide to the new features of Java 8. The book begins with a practical introduction to lambdas, using real-world Java code. Next, it covers the new Streams API and shows how you can use it to make collection-based code radically easier to understand and maintain. It also explains other major Java 8 features including default methods, Optional, CompletableFuture, and the new Date and Time API.
Introducing Java 8
I wrote a free short book, Introducing Java 8, published by O’Reilly to get you started with Java 8. To learn about Java 8 in more details I recommend reading my reference book Java 8 in Action: Lambdas, streams and functional-style programming
Java SE 8 is perhaps the largest change to Java in its history, led by its flagship feature—lambda expressions. If you’re an experienced developer looking to adopt Java 8 at work, this short guide will walk you through all of the major changes before taking a deep dive into lambda expressions and Java 8’s other big feature: the Streams API.