Hi, I am currently a first year university student and one of my modules is the evil Java! (It's only evil because its the one module I actually have to get my head around without having previous knowledge!) We have been set an assignment and so on, but I just don't feel confident with Java at the moment, too much goes wrong too quickly for me - netbeans is very rarely happy with a program I make, regardless of how simple it is! I was just wondering if anyone does create programs with Java, how did you begin? What resources did you use? Did you find it easier to do it the academic style (ie learning this is a do loop - blah blah blah) or down the more practical root of being given a problem and then working out how you'd solve the problem through a Java program? Any useful websites out there? Books you'd reccomend? It is something I would like to get my head around. Ultimately I think it simply comes down to experience and patience with the learning process, but the extra heads up and resources will comfort me!
Hi, I've been a Java programmer since 1998. Your goal as a student is maybe different in that you need to learn the fundamentals rather than commercial apps. Some of the Sams/Learn Java in 24 hrs books are OK, there are lots of tutorials onlines. JavaRanch is considered lame, avoid The practice exams for the java programmer test might be good for you, they are online. If you want to have some fun with cutting edge code right away though: http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/ Google has a Java API and if you follow the sample code you can create some useful apps right away, I use it every day. Servlet and JSP programming understanding is pretty important to getting an actual Java job, so if you go that route find some sample servlets. You might want to get Tomcat as a server, Eclipse, find or buy myeclipse license, etc. for tools. Some random hints: -Strings are immutable, don't change them, use StringBuffer -check for nulls wherever they may conceivably occur, this is a really common error. -Don't be lazy with try\catch blocks like me -Lots of useful code at http://commons.apache.org/ -Java has a zillion Lists, Maps, Sets, etc. and it's good to understand them first before programming. ArrayLists and their Iterators are commonly used, I just learned how to use a Queue last week. -I started with Hello world, then some graphics programming, then a web aution site, then the real world. Happy coding
I'm a first year Computer Science student, and Java makes up our two core modules atm. Basically, you just need to get your head around the basic principals of programming, like loops, decision statements, primitive types etc. Once you do all that, you can move onto just basically using the Java API that has lists of methods that'll do pretty much everything for you. For content, search youtube for java tutorials. There's tons on there that might give you a more visual understanding. Also, this link might come in useful: http://ricin.lfsnal.org/books/oreilly/
If you are comfortable with basic such as loops etc, I'd go down the route of a small project. If you aren't keep with the academic paint by numbers.