[ajug-members] cert.

[Keli Morgan]

Thanks for your advice.  I appreciate all the help I can get!!  

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Keli Morgan 
(770) 823-9265

-------------- Original message from "Alan Honeycutt" <alan.n.honeycutt at gmail.com>: -------------- 


Experienced programmers: Is java difficult to people who have programmed for 5+ years with some sort of procedural-language and then move to java?
In 2000, I moved from a C/assembly job to a Java position (having never written a line of Java) and had no trouble making the transition.  I feel that most of the knowledge that took me from my early level of "competent" to "good" (which probably took a couple of years) didn't actually have much to do with Java syntax.  In the beginning, you can always google whatever you're trying to do (i.e. "java sort"), so memorizing the libraries isn't something I'd worry about.  Honestly, there's just too much out there to remember it all.  In addition to the stuff that comes with the JDK, you'll use many open source utilities like Apache Commons in real world Java apps.  Just write as much Java code as you can and you'll eventually memorize the things that you commonly use.

If you want to become a truly useful Java developer, I'd recommend learning the basics of OO and JUnit (unit testing), getting comfortable with a good IDE (I use Eclipse), and focusing on writing human-readable code.  That's going to put you ahead of the majority of people with whom I've ever worked.  There are plenty of good books out there, but I found Robert Martin's /Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices/ really made a lot of sense to me WRT some of the non-syntaxy stuff that I'm talking about.
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