(Should be in an FAQ). Reccomended books / tutorails for total newbies?

[Mike Barnard]

Hi.

I'm interested in learning about Java programming. I'm suprised on
searching through this forum that there seems to be no other "how..."
threads so I'll start one.

I'm in the UK, employed with a family so have little time for college
courses. Not that I've found any near me anyway. I want to write a
desktop application that is cross platform and won't need high speed
(C++) code running so Java seems ideal. I have the JDK and netbeans
6.8 on my PC, now I need lessons.

The java website has Greenfoot which seems of no use to me. I haven't
looked at the others yet as the preamble says they expect prior
programming experience or teaching.

The books on Amazon seem to be about 10 years out of date and the new
ones have reviews that say they are full of old info.

Web tutorials are notorious for teaching bad practices, so I
understand but they can't be all bad, can they.

So, reccomendations for a way to learn Jave, please? Properly.

Thanks.

Mike.

 

[Mike Barnard]

On Thu, 03 Jun 2010 20:41:35 +0100, Mike Barnard

Pardon the spelling mistakes.

Tutorials
Java

 

[Stefan Ram]

So, reccomendations for a way to learn Jave, please? Properly.

http://www.jave.de/docs/index.html

I have listed some resources at:

http://www.purl.org/stefan_ram/pub/java_resources_en

. What constitutes a »good« tutorial also depends on your
previous knowledge. I am aware of some Java tutorials, but
not of any tutorial I would rate very high or especially
recommend.

 

[markspace]

I'm in the UK, employed with a family so have little time for college
courses.

Do you have any coursework or experience programming? This will make a
difference in what we recommend.

Greenhorns need some basic programming knowledge, which I'd have to
think about how to proceed. "How to program" is hard to acquire on your
own. Some sort of correspondence course might be an option, although
not a first option.

The java website has Greenfoot ...
The books on Amazon seem to be about 10 years out of date...

If you could let us know what you actually looked, it might help us help
you. I'd recommend O'Reilly's "Learning Java" if you have some
programming experience. Get the 3rd edition, that's up-to-date. It
would be hard for someone with no programming experience to learn from
this however.

There's also a programming course I took at javapassion.com, but they
charge now, and their course is also aimed at more experienced
programmers and not people with no experience.

The "right way" to learn is to take formal course work. There's enough
computer science, math, and software engineering involved that it helps
to have an organized study plan, which is very hard to do on your own.
Also developing contacts in the industry can be done through a school
more easily, and this is also very helpful in one's career. Still,
let's think about your situation and try to get something that works for
you.

 

[Jeff Higgins]

So, reccomendations for a way to learn Jave, please? Properly.

<http://java.sun.com/learning/index.jsp>

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

I'm interested in learning about Java programming. I'm suprised on
searching through this forum that there seems to be no other "how..."
threads so I'll start one.

I'm in the UK, employed with a family so have little time for college
courses. Not that I've found any near me anyway. I want to write a
desktop application that is cross platform and won't need high speed
(C++) code running so Java seems ideal. I have the JDK and netbeans
6.8 on my PC, now I need lessons.

The java website has Greenfoot which seems of no use to me. I haven't
looked at the others yet as the preamble says they expect prior
programming experience or teaching.

The books on Amazon seem to be about 10 years out of date and the new
ones have reviews that say they are full of old info.

Web tutorials are notorious for teaching bad practices, so I
understand but they can't be all bad, can they.

So, reccomendations for a way to learn Jave, please? Properly.

I believe there are good web tutorials as well.

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/ is not so bad.

But books are usually good for learning programming stuff.

If you are not an experienced software developer that just
need to learn Java, then you need a book with focus on good
explaining and not on super duper JLS correctness in use
of all terms.

I would go for one of the popular writers of programming
languages for beginners books: Horton, Eckel, Schildt etc..
They may not actually be very good at the language, but they
are good at writing beginners books about programming
languages.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

I want to write a
desktop application that is cross platform and won't need high speed
(C++) code running so Java seems ideal.

http://java.dzone.com/jazoon-java-performance

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

On Thu, 03 Jun 2010 20:41:35 +0100, Mike Barnard
Pardon the spelling mistakes.

It was perfectly readable. No problem.

Arne

 

[Jeff Higgins]

Hi.

I'm interested in learning about Java programming.

<http://www.cs.princeton.edu/introcs/cs/>
<http://www.cs.princeton.edu/introcs/home/>
<http://www.horstmann.com/corejava.html>
<http://www.dickbaldwin.com/toc.htm>

 

[Mike Barnard]

Hi.

Here it's 9 am and I'm late for work, but I just wanted to give a big
thanks to you all for your reccomendations. I'll look through them
tonight and choose something. I have been considering the Head First
book on Java, but even it's second edition is nearly 6 years old and
based on an older version of Java. Are there NO up to date books?

I have never been taught how to program but I have played with Basic
on the Atari (How long ago?!) and Delphi 5 about 10 years ago from
books so I at least know what a variable is.

Mike.

 

[RedGrittyBrick]

Here it's 9 am and I'm late for work, but I just wanted to give a big
thanks to you all for your reccomendations. I'll look through them
tonight and choose something. I have been considering the Head First
book on Java, but even it's second edition is nearly 6 years old and
based on an older version of Java. Are there NO up to date books?

Books take a long time to write

Don't worry about books being old. When learning Java I bought
O'Reilly's "Learning Java". So long as it covers Generics, it should be
OK as your initial learning tool. Don't expect to learn all of Java
quickly, I concentrated on Java SE (not EE) and Swing.

I found Sun/Oracle's Java tutorials to be very useful and I recommend
you use them.

I have never been taught how to program but I have played with Basic
on the Atari (How long ago?!) and Delphi 5 about 10 years ago from
books so I at least know what a variable is.

Your Delphi 5 experience will have taught you about Object Oriented
programming, you might want to brush up on OO fundamentals by following
tutorials that show how inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism
works in Java and especially the use of interfaces where other languages
might use multiple inheritance. I recall all that jargon and those
concepts seemed a bit intimidating when I first learned about OO but
after a dozen or so small command-line programs the concepts should
become clear in your mind, if they aren't already.

Since you have used Delphi, I suggest you pick one of the major Java
IDEs. I use Eclipse but others use Netbeans. Both are excellent. There
are others.

For your portable desktop application I would advocate learning how to
create Swing user interfaces programmatically rather than using a Delphi
style GUI builder (Netbeans has a GUI bulder named Matisse). At least
initially. A good knowledge of Swing layout managers is useful. There
are experts who disagree with this point of view but I believe it is the
best way to get to understand Swing.

I also suggest learning about design-patterns if that isn't an area you
are familiar with. You can defer this a while but eventually it will
become important as your programs become complex and in need of
systematic organisation. The two patterns I found most interesting
initially were Model-View-Controller and Observer.

If you use Google Groups to search this newsgroup you'll find plenty of
prior discussion of learning Java and of Java books.