[ajug-members] New to java

[Doug Morgan]

After you've done the online studying and gone through the exercises
from a couple books, I would recommend getting the Java SCJP
certification from Sun.  It would show that even though you don't have a
lot of experience, you have initiative and have proven you can learn.
In the end, initiative is more important than experience.

You can also pick up volunteer work for a non-profit or something like
that to get some experience.

Your first job is likely to be maintenance and support of existing
applications.  At my workplace, we bring new people into the maintenance
group since they need to learn our industry and products, as well as
enterprise architecture, J2EE, Cold Fusion, CORBA, SQL and C++, before
they won't be dangerous to let loose on projects.  It really takes a
couple years to get all that in your head.

Don't let that put you off though.  Maintenance is real programming, and
in some sense it is a lot harder than writing new stuff from scratch.
Figuring out which line of code out of 1 million is broken and what you
need to do to fix it is not simple, and it's often a very rewarding
challenge.

In my experience, people who have come up through maintenance or QA are
almost always better programmers than those who did not.


-----Original Message-----
From: ajug-members-bounces at ajug.org
[mailto:ajug-members-bounces at ajug.org] On Behalf Of didoss at comcast.net
Sent: Friday, July 14, 2006 8:27 AM
To: General AJUG membership forum (100-200 messages/month)
Subject: Re: [ajug-members] New to java

Luckily, the tools that you would need to write Java programs are free
online,...so get a good book (I've found the Head First series useful)
that will walk you through and teach you to make classes and
applications,...and pull down a version of java,...decide on a text
editor (really makes you think through the code), or an IDE (does some
of the thinking for you, so better for when you've suffered the
pain),...

then it is a matter of selling yourself in an interview.

Having recently been in the market, I didn't see much (in my area) for
"entry-level" java engineers, so your challenge is going to be getting
in the door.  Then, as Rai noted, it might be easiest to try to get into
a maintenance role (often does not require many design skills to get you
started; and provides a code base to study - "why does it do this").

Good luck.

Dianne

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Lester" <cwlester at bellsouth.net>
> Hi all,
> 
> I am new to Java and was wondering if anyone has any input on how to
get 
> experience or an entry-level position that does not require previous
experience.  
> I will appreciate any advice.
> 
> Thanks,
> Cathy