Good book and study plan

[hugstable]

I have just completed Murachs Java 5 sdk book... I enjoyed the first 3/4 's of the book but the very end, the part that i need (xml and database chapters), the examples had alot of incomplete code.

Do you have any recommendations on a good book...

i try and read about an hour a night, and spend an hour doing the examples - is this enough to learn?

i do alot of web programming, i have my own business and i want to learn java so i can build some desktop apps for my clients and also move away from coldfusion and towards JSP...

 

[timw]

Books never seem to cover the more real-life challenges of Java development. Besides, you can read all you want but it just stops you getting in there and 'learning by doing'. There is a wealth of information on the web as you know, though it's often tricky to locate the exact bit you want.

The thing with Java is that though the core language is fairly easy to grasp, the bulk of what you will use is provided by code libraries, either Sun's or others. There is therefore a lot to learn whenever you come to do something new.

Ensure you are solid on the core stuff. Classes / interfaces / oo principles and syntax. Then go out there and try to do it. You will need to do much reading around but you should make steady progress.

With JSP, if you've got more than a trivial web application, you'll probably want to consider using Struts or something similar to manage the work flow. I've recently done some JSP work and I used the Spring Framework's MVC support to do this. It's my first serious 'go' at a JSP application and it seems to do the trick, though it was a bit of a learning curve.

Tim

 

[hugstable]

thanks for the advice - i just started my first non book project yesterday (going to build a SWING XML app for my office to manage tasks for employees...

i will check out struts and JSP next, after my little pet project is done...

I would also like to read THINKING IN JAVA... I heard that is very a very good read - talks about attacking problems...

thanks again

 

[timw]

I like 'TIJ' because it does do a solid job of teaching the core concepts.

Remember, though ... this particular forum is for J2EE questions (i.e. to do with Sun's J2EE API). For core Java questions (and definitely Swing ones) use forum269. There is also a separate forum for JSP questions at forum695 for when you move on to them. Struts has yet another forum (search for that one, I don't have it on my threadminder at present).

Tim

 

[chrissie1]

JSF/Myfaces seems more of the way to go these days as a replacement of struts.

For the rest I would also look into hibernate and Log4j.

But before going to struts or jsf you should have a grasp of jsp and servlets.

Christiaan Baes
Belgium

"My old site" - Me

 

[timw]

Yeah, but if you invest your time(+money) developing in JSF, sooner or later something else will come along claiming to be the next must-use technology.

The Spring framework offers certain levels of abstraction with its MVC implementation. You can develop your web work-flow with this and then swap you view technology around with little impact on the rest (in theory). And Spring can support lots of other stuff as well as being built on a bean container providing valuable inversion of control.

Tim