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DSlomer64
  • Member for 5 years, 4 months
  • Last seen more than 2 years ago
About

I learned Fortran IV/"Ten Statement Fortran" in 1968 and the rest is history: BASIC, PL/I, Pascal, Z80 assembly (to name but a few and in no particular order), and C--but nothing object-oriented.

I've taught programming classes in BASIC and Pascal mainly at high school level but some at two community colleges.

I dabbled in C+ (typical grade in humanities courses; weird-sounding guitar chord; and the compiler) but objected to the accompanying disorientation that were objects. However...

For a decade I've been "into" VBasic 6.0 and VBA, thus acquiring some sort of barebones intro in the vicinity of object-oriented "stuff" and now ...

... definitely last (after a brief fling at Javascript) but certainly not least: Java.

But gee whiz what a trip it's been so far for the 5 or so months I've been seriously trying. Messing with Z80 assembly language had a more palatable learning curve.

I just today--January 13, 2018--paid @Commonsware $20 for a 4,000++ page book (The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development) and access to untold wealth. I wish I had begun my quest of Java with this material. (YOU should own it, M_. Android Developer!) But such was not the case. Instead...

I deliberately sought and bought an Oreilly book by Pat Niemeyer and, after mostly-profitlessly struggling thru the previews and don't-do's and rambling verbosity and cuteness ... well, the title is "Learning Java", but it should be more like "Learn the History and Details of Java Once You Know Java." I hate it as an initial text.

I also bought Sams' (Cadenhead) Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days (pretty good; it is what it says--i.e., sort of lightweight) and am considering Ivor Horton's Beginning Java, which is very detailed in terms of threads and GUIs and other stuff. The "For Dummies" book I initially bought stood up well for a couple of weeks (it is what it says, too).

In short, though, I'm getting the hang of it: threads, events, GUIs, directory tree walking, generics...

And GridBagLayout has freed me from Netbeans GUIbuilder. I heartily recommend investigating it.

P.S. My graphic is a zoomed-in region of a sort-of-northwest part of the Mandelbrot set. Wrote code to make it many years ago; found Java code to create the initial picture; modified it to allow zoom-in. Math's purty, ain't it?

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