Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Old guys should keep learning. I like to write computer programs, so one of the things I am (re)learning is programming in Java.

I am spending some time each day studying the Java programming language. Some of my background:

• I have written thousands of lines of FORTRAN code
• I have written thousands of lines of C code
• I have studied object-oriented everything for decades

Java is object-oriented (please no arguments from the purist of OO). Java looks a lot like C and C++. The concepts are all about the same. You have algorithms and data structures. Okay, now I have probably angered all the fans of Java. Anyways, some thoughts from an old guy looking at a newer programming language.

• The computers today are much faster than they used to be
• The computers today are much cheaper than they used to be
• All the needed programming tools for Java can be downloaded at no cost
• All the needed documentation for Java is available online at no cost.

One more point on freely available information:

• I can type questions into a browser and find answers on the Internet.

For example, I can type

java copy a text file

and have a few dozen pages of examples to read. This is great. Which leads to the question

why should people pay money to colleges to learn this stuff?

Hmm, a topic for another day.

. . . . . .

For reference, I am reading two Java books from O’Reilly:

“Head First Java, 2nd edition” by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates.

“Learning Java” by Patrick Niemeyer and Jonathan Knudsen.

I like both books. The “Head First” book is easy to understand while “Learning Java” is deeper.