My Java Journey – Intro

This is a series of posts which will attempt to introduce my cherished readers to the Java programming language. I started learning java a couple of years ago. Although it wasn’t easy at first, I think it was worth it.

Duke

Disclaimer: I am no expert at Java or any other programming language and therefore not remotely an authority in those regards. Actually I’m a nutritionist. Seriously. All I will be saying in this series of posts are from my thick head and from things I have read during my Java journey.

Advice: Eat fresh and neatly washed fruits and vegetables, drink loads of water, otherwise, you’ll start writing crazy stuff like I am doing now.

The first time I saw a computer was when I was 13 years (I’m from that part of the world ), and gosh, it was love at first sight. I was mostly fascinated about that little arrow (which I later heard was called a cursor) that moved on a screen according to the movement of a small device on the table. I got hooked. I enrolled for a class in which I learnt basic computer use. I enjoyed it but it really didn’t satisfy my urges. I needed more challenge.

Unfortunately after the class, I had little to no practice since my family owned no computer. Worse, I had to go to boarding school for 3 years. But it didn’t really sway me. Luck being on my side, my family got a computer while I was gone. I had the opportunity to use it every time I came back on holidays. That was really when my journey started.

I looked for something that was really challenging that I could do on the computer (playing road-rush and Super Mario was not much of a task, neither was typing and checking my mail once a while). I had the chance to corrupt our windows installation multiple times and do some formatting in the learning process. As it turned out, finding the solutions to my computer problems were more fun that playing with clippit in Microsoft word 2003.

I happened to chance upon programming languages a while later and from what I read, it wasn’t an easy thing to do. I thought to myself ‘I’ve met my match today’. I did some reading and the name Java kept appearing. That was when I made the decision to learn Java.

After my secondary school education, I continued with my infatuation (or maybe it was love) with programming. I read about windows batch programming and other stuff. It was then that I chanced on a tutorial that I really love (God bless you David J. Eck). It was a lot of reading and I read it. By then, I had left home for the university to read nutrition (I told you I was a nutritionist), without my own computer. I had to do most of the reading on my “Chinese phone” – a non-smart phone that has an eBook reader. I had to convert the tutorial to txt and read. The least chance I had with other’s computers, I tried to practice what I read. All my resources were on a pen drive which I bought.

The learning was slow, having to combine it with my academic work. I wrote my first GUI program 3 years later and I’ve been at it since then. I am not in any way saying it has to be difficult for everybody, people even have it worse. I’m only trying to say “persevere!”. Next, I'll speak about what Java is.