Hi all! My name is Dima. This is my first article about IT, so don't judge too harshly. It will be useful to those who have just begun to join the ranks of programmers, but are afraid of getting lost in this vast sea of information.
Background
Imagine you're 26 years old, you've been laid off from your cell phone company, and your CEO has fled to Europe because his fraudulent practices are forcing 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 you work for? What would you really like to become? After the layoff, I spent two months searching for myself... and became a different person. I realized that I could be whatever I wanted: a doctor, 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. As a result, I became a programmer! I have been successfully working in an IT company for a year now, and I am incredibly happy about it. I love learning, so I've spent hundreds of hours studying Java, web technologies, and have prepared a summary of what will help you quickly delve into the world of Java.
First stage: 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 complex 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, working with arrays, OOP, etc.
Second stage: What to code on?
You will need a development environment. In the Java world there are three of them:
IDEA (free and paid)
NetBeans (free)
Eclipse (free)
I tried all three.
NetBeans is ancient and ugly, and is currently in the Apache incubator, so it is unclear whether there will be a new release.
Eclipse is popular overseas because it is free and a little nicer than Netbeans.
IDEA is the dominant development environment, at least for us. The difference between the paid version and the free one is only in working with frameworks (Spring), which you do not need yet. Moreover, it is made by Russian guys from St. Petersburg. Let's support domestic producers!
I read them according to this principle: if 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” most of all: there are a lot of sketches, there is testing after each chapter. Secondly, watching video tutorials on YouTube:
The list could be many times longer, but these channels are the most informative. Alishev is the best video course in Russian on 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, having read the next chapter of the book, practiced a little, and then recorded the lesson. Gosha Dudar is galloping across Europe. You should watch it if you already know other languages and just want to familiarize yourself 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 it, don’t force yourself: look for something better that’s right for you. Third, by practicing interactively:
The best option is JavaRush . I passed it 2 times. The first time I didn’t understand anything, I peeked at the answers. The second time I worked more consciously, practicing new possibilities of the language. I gained a full understanding of OOP and working with arrays only after him. Stepik is a cool course. There is both video training and interactive training. Everything is free, I don’t understand what they live on =) The rest are interactive courses in English. If you know the language, you can try your hand there too. Regarding paid online courses: I looked at various courses that I found on the Internet and I will 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 a speaker must have a calling to convey information, and if he doesn’t, 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 could be:
History: how much I studied, how I got a job, what difficulties I went through.
Where to start in web development in the world of Java.
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