What to learn, where to learn, how to learn?

Hi all! My name is Dima. This is my first article about IT, so do not judge strictly. It will be useful for those who have just started joining the ranks of programmers, but are afraid to get lost in this vast sea of ​​information.

background

Imagine that you are 26 years old, you have been laid off by a cell company, and your CEO has fled to Europe because his fraudulent activities force him to live outside the country. This is what my December 31, 2016 was like. I could find a similar job in a related field and there were even offers, but...would that make me happy? Have you ever asked yourself what are you working for? Who would you really like to be? After the reduction, I searched for myself for two months ... and became a different person. I realized that I can be whatever I want: a doctor, I can become a carpenter, a businessman. It's all a matter of time, the main thing is to do more than others, and I will achieve everything. In the end, I became a programmer! For a year now I have been successfully working in an IT company, which I am incredibly happy about. I love to learn, so I spent hundreds of hours learning Java,

Stage One: Enlightenment

You need to understand that programming is not easy. And the fact that at first you don’t succeed is normal. At the start, I studied Python for two months, and when I saw the cycles, they seemed to me a wildly complicated thing. The most important thing is the basics: without understanding them, you will not be able to quickly learn new technologies. I'm talking about conditions, loops, arrays, OOP, and so on.

Second stage: What to code?

You will need a development environment. There are three of them in the Java world:

1. IDEA (free and paid)
2. NetBeans (freeware)
3. Eclipse (freeware)

I tried all three.

1. NetBeans is ancient and ugly, now in the apache incubator at all, so it's not clear if there will be a new release.
2. Eclipse is popular over the hill because it's free and a bit nicer than Netbeans.
3. IDEA is the dominant development environment, at least for us. The difference between the paid version and the free version is only in working with frameworks (Spring), which you don’t need yet. Moreover, Russian guys from St. Petersburg make it. Let's support local manufacturers!

Stage three: Where to start learning?

First, the old fashioned way, reading books:

1. Head First, "Learning Java"
2. G. Schildt, "Java 8. Beginner's Guide"
3. Kay Horstmann, "Java. Professional's Library"
4. Bruce Eckel, " Java Philosophy "

I read them according to this principle: I didn’t understand in one book - I started reading in another, since the authors present the same information in different ways. I liked the Head First book "Learning Java" the most: there are a lot of sketches, there is a test after each chapter. Secondly, by watching video tutorials on youtube:

1. alishev
2. Java Lessons
3. Gosha Dudar

The list could be many times longer, but these channels are the most informative. Alishev is the best video course in Russian in terms of picture, timbre and material. He also has a paid course on Udemy: I was one of the first to buy it. Java Lessons is a very informative course. There are already 500 videos, but the quality suffers. It seems that the guy, after reading the next chapter of the book, practiced a little, and then wrote down the lesson. Gosha Dudar is a gallop through Europe. You should watch it if you already know other languages ​​and just want to get acquainted with the syntax of the language. Important note. If you watched some video course and didn’t understand anything, you don’t like the picture, the voice - quit this business, don’t force yourself: look for something better that suits you. Third, by practicing interactively:

1. CodeGym
2. Stepik
3. Hackerranck
4. code academy

The best option is CodeGym . I passed it 2 times. The first time I did not understand anything, I looked at the answers. The second time I worked more consciously, practicing the new possibilities of the language. A complete understanding of OOP, working with arrays came to me only after him. Stepik are cool courses. There is also a video tutorial and an interactive one. Everything is free, I don’t understand what they live on =) The rest are interactive courses in English. If you know the language, then you can try your hand there. For paid online courses: I looked at various courses that I found on the Internet and I can honestly say that the level of webinars is worse than a gamer's stream on twitch. The picture is bad, the sound is disgusting, the teacher is boring. In general, I realized that the speaker should have a vocation to convey information, and if he does not, then there is a high probability that you will die of boredom. I hope this information will help you save time and effort. If my article was useful to you, write, I can continue. Topics can be:

1. History: how much I studied, how I got a job, what difficulties I went through.
2. How to get started in web development in the Java world.
3. Types of authentication, authorization.