JAVA Beginner help. Thread

Hello Dahamonnah,

the No. 1 advice for any programming language is to code as much as you can yourself. It doesn't matter if you just started - you can play around with the things one learns even during the first week. And it's a lot easier when what you do is fun. For example, you could make a simple text-based adventure, only using Java output (System.out.println), loops (while, for) and clauses (if, switch), all of which you can learn within a week. Sure, there'll be no graphics at all, but it's a nice way to keep you interested and experiment with something closer to real life than the exercises given (the solving of which is just as important, of course).
  Personally, I prefer books to videos to learn from,  for a number of reasons:
 1) There's no time constraint - I can stare at a certain part for as long as I wish, without having to constantly hover over the pause button.
 2) I can just copy-paste right off the text in front of me, if I want to try out some code myself.
 3) It's a smaller file compared to videos, meaning I can download it to wherever I want, without having to sacrifice much storage (although this is no problem if you're always online).
 4) It's much easier to navigate to a certain point.

  Of course, this is just my experience, and to be frank I haven't really tried to learn from videos, so I'm sure there are advantages to video learning as well. What I suggest is to try both ways and stick to the one that suits you most. If you're looking for free e-books, Bruce Eckel has written some nice books about both Java and C++, you can get them from his site. You can also have a look at your local library, if you don't want or can't buy books, they may have some books about programming. The book I learned from was "Learn Java in 21 Days", which I was satisfied with, but it's frankly more up to the reader than up to the book if one wants to learn a language well.
  Another thing that'll help you later on, is looking on forums/sites for people with the same problem as yours. For example, stackOverflow has many questions that are already answered, so that I don't even have to ask somebody. It'll come in really handy after your first month or so with Java.
  I hope these tips help you a bit. If you need any other Java learning help, you can contact me anytime. Good luck!

Oh, and don't foget, Google. The best friend for any coder....

But if you really have question about Java, or stuff you're stuck with, just drop me a line. Preferably by posting on the forum and then PMing me the forum post. That way, if I can, I'll answer on the forums for others to benefit as well.

Its not completely necessary to buy a book since the internet has a lot of references and tutorials, its how I started learning programming.

I recommend checking out www.codecademy.com as a start. For me it was really fun to start with, because of its interactivity and there were pretty much always the solutions in the forums, if you get stuck (or tipps, if you don't want to spoil everything). I can only judge on javascript on there though, because that's what got me started. It gives you a first idea about what programming is about and teaches some fundamental things. It's probably better to switch over to books and other tutorials later on though.