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Sunday, April 23, 2006

How to Procrastinate

The last programming course I had was based on Pascal back in 1994 at CMU. Prior to that were two high school programming courses (interpreted BASIC on Apple IIs), and a crash introduction to C at the Tennessee Governor's School for the Sciences in the summer of 1990.

Friday I bought Beginning Programming with Java For Dummies (2nd. Ed.)

Since it's an introductory book, most of the examples are focused on using text input and output. And guess what, using text input and output it all looks suspiciously like C from 1990.

The biggest difference I've seen so far is the depth of the API and the huge jump in power in the development tools. I just downloaded a copy of NetBeans IDE 5.0, after watching a demo, and it looks really cool.

There are just times in life when only an "if" statement will do.

2 comments:

Tom said...

Adam, let me know if you need help with Java. I have a couple years experience with it. In fact, the project I just got moved back to last week is Java-based.

Java is easier than C and C++ if only because it doesn't let you do stuff that causes evil memory errors.

Adam said...

Howdy Tom! Thanks for the offer.

I finished the download, and the installation looks okay, but for some reason the IDE won't crank up. I verified it located the sdk in the right directory, so that isn't it.

I'll look at it tomorrow when I've got some more procrastinating to do.