Learning Java

As I mentioned a while back in my review of Coders at Work, I've been reusing the same programming skills for the last five years and really need to break out of that and learn some new techniques. While ideally that would involve learning something truly different, and I still hope to do that, I have a fully work-justified reason to learn Java right now, and several people in Coders at Work really love the language. So today I started.

The plan is to take about four hours each Wednesday for the forseeable future and devote that time to learning new programming languages, new programming techniques, or new ways of thinking about software, starting with Java. I'm starting with Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel and going from there.

I've accordingly resurrected my language notes pages, added a final Python update (for now at least), and started a new Java page. I'll try to make a general journal entry when I add more to that page for those who are interested in following my experiences.

I'm still trying to decide what my learning projects will be for Java. The software my group will be picking up at work is more of an advanced topic, and I'll need something shorter-term and easier to wrap my mind around. Doing extensive work on the remctl Java implementation is the most likely. I may also take a look at the WebAuth Java implementation from Oxford and see about adding AES support to it.

It's tempting to use Java to write a Getting Things Done implementation to replace my current Roundup hack, but I still sort of want to do that in Python and Python's AJAX support to continue learning more about Python.

I should come up with something else, since something I could write from the ground up in Java would be ideal. Will have to ponder.