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Message: [QUOTE="Eric Sosman, post: 4070175"] An old joke: Someone lost on the streets of New York hails a passing stranger and asks "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" The stranger answers "Practice, practice, practice!" ... and that's how you gain and build skill in Java, or in the wider area of programming, or in playing the oboe or fancy rope twirling or sabre fencing or pretty much anything else. If you want to get to the top of your game and stay there, you've got to spend the effort and keep on spending it. (For your own peace of mind, I hope it's a game you will keep enjoying.) Write code: "Hello, world" and "eight queens" and suchlike toys while you're just learning how to work the language, moving toward larger problems as you gain facility. Read code: Study what others have written, ponder why something was done *this* way rather than *that* way, make up your own mind about the trade-offs. Learn several languages: Fashions come and go in this industry, and the person who can make a career out of one language is a rare bird indeed -- besides, what you learn from one language can often help you in another. Get experience: See if you can land a summer job as an intern or something, to gain some notion of how the scale difference between real-world projects and classroom projects affects the way you must think. Read: It's an extraordinarily efficient way to soak up information, once your skills and experience are up to the challenge. Here's a really effective suggestion, although it's hard to do because it's humbling and can sometimes be almost humiliating: When you make a mistake in a program and later go back and fix it, write about it in a diary or log. Review the diary every so often, and see if there are similarities among the kinds of mistakes you make, potholes in your own thought processes that predispose you to certain kinds of errors. Try to see how your characteristic mistakes come about, and what you might do to make them less likely. Re-read your own code a year later or five years later, and if you don't shudder or at the very least shake your head and say "Tut-tut!" it means you're no longer improving, but have come to a standstill and need a jolt. Stick with it, keep moving: In this field (as in many others), you never actually "arrive." Not if you're good. [/QUOTE]

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