Booleans may seem harmless, but using them can be fraught with peril. When you can’t avoid them, follow these five rules. Booleans are deceptively simple. They look harmless—just true or false, right?

I have a bit of Java code where I need to check if an object is null. If the object is null, set a flag in a boolean primitive for use later, and if not, do something to the object. Is it faster for ...