Learning Java - whats the best way.

[patmahe]

Hi,

As above really, the best way, is it books, online tutorials or what?? And if so what books/tutorials have you found useful. I learn best from an explanation/working example approach.

To give you an idea of my background, I learned Java at College about 8 years ago now, had a terrible lecturer who was very fragmented and unprepared in what he taught. As a result I learned just enough to pass the course and no more, but no real structure. After college I went into Technical support and never looked at Java again.

Fast forward to the present day and I am in a Software Testing role, which is fine and I enjoy my work. However I will in the near future be required to write test suites in Java to automate some testing. So I need to learn it essentially from scratch. I still understand the basics of OO like inheritance and OO design etc but I would need to start again with the rest of it.

Anyone been in a similar situation, what did you find most beneficial.

Thanks in advance.

[SlidingSideways]

"Thinking in Java" is about the best of the "free" books/tutorials out there: http://mindview.net/Books/TIJ4

(This site may be down at the moment though, or our internet connection could just be being slow)

Edit - Looks like you have to pay for the 4th edition, you can download the 3rd edition free still though: http://www.mindviewinc.com/Books/downloads.html

[patmahe]

Thanks. Don't mind paying for a book or whatever if it does a good job.

[0000]

patmahe said:

Fast forward to the present day and I am in a Software Testing role, which is fine and I enjoy my work. However I will in the near future be required to write test suites in Java to automate some testing. So I need to learn it essentially from scratch. I still understand the basics of OO like inheritance and OO design etc but I would need to start again with the rest of it.

That's actually not a bad way back in - getting to write Java code which isn't going to be shipped to a customer.

The book above's good and the Sun Oracle tutorials are of course pretty comprehensive, but there isn't really any substitute for just getting stuck in and writing some code, whether for your own projects, modifying existing open source projects, etc.

[Ebo100]

There was a web site mentioned on 'click' on the BBC news channel on Saturday called CODEYEAR.com that points to an online Java tutorial. I'm eight lessons in and seems a bit slow but then I haven't done any programming since BASIC and a SQL in the 1980's, so it suits me