The learning stages of Java depends on the person who’s trying to learn it. It can be a tough journey or a smooth sailing one. Whatever your learning journey is, please do not quit. Believe me, it will be all worth it.
Take time to read this one from a self-taught programmer, Carlos Hunter, regarding his thoughts on the learning stages of Java.
“Assuming you’ve never programmed before:
Kinda like this:
- Fun, I’m learning to output Hello World. But what the heck does “static void main(String[] args)” mean?
- Ok, so math operations are easy, they’re as the’ve always been. I can also declare ints, chars, bools…
- Learn loops and conditional. Not difficult.
- Learn to declare and use methods. Cool.
- Learn more things like arrays, classes… Multidimensional arrays..?
- Learn strange things like polymorphism, abstract classes, inheritance, constructors… May be difficult for beginners.
- Think “please stop”
- Learn more new concepts and language stuff, some keywords.
- Get tired of it
- Learn about exceptions
- Learn about threads
- Learn to work with files.
- You know most of what you need but there are some concepts you don’t know very well so you are useless. Everything seems to be very hard to learn.
- Try to make something, but you are going to be the next five hours debugging.
- Re-learn everything again
- Feel you’ll never do a program that runs with no bugs before.
- Spend more hours debugging while you realize little facts you didn’t know.
- Almost give up, or give up
- Discover any question you had about programming is already in stackoverflow
- Get banned from asking in stackoverflow for a week
- Break everything trying to do anything
- Find some good book
- Learn new stuff like streams, etcetera. If you don’t speak English as a native it may be very difficult.
- Say kill me please
- Hard learning of getting accustomed to coding
- Learn to make GUIs, because that’s what we always wanted, right?
- Trying to do some project you found in a tutorial.
- Fail.
- Just copy the code.
- No, not copy-paste, type it.
- Implement new things using what you learnt.
- This is where you start to learn to program.
- Debug and program some more…
- This will take a while.
- More debugging.
- At this point you probably got used to some java important packages.
- MORE DEBUGGING.
- Add things to your GUI program.
- Continue programming.
- You ask yourself things like why abstract classes exist if there are interfaces.
- Suffer.
- Now you should be comfortable with Java.
- Continue getting accustomed to program with Java.
- Now you feel you can call yourself a programmer, after at (the very) least three months of everyday hard work since starting.
- Read code and improve your terrible skill.
- Get used to it.
- Realize there are some stuff that you weren’t taught
- Learn what you need
- Let the time pass (“What do I do now?”)
- You know Java.
- Learn boring sorting algorithms, etc, whatever you want.
- Keep learning.
End.”