whats the best way to learn JAVA?
 

Hi im an I.T student trying to learn java. i understand some concepts but dont understand most. i can explain some things to the teacher about concepts but when it coems to writting code and exams i just dont know how to write it. i always need a guide. what can i do to improve?ive tried to read a lot. i read over and over but i just dont understand 100%, mayb only about 50%. what can i do?

Practice ;)
There are some tutorials on the Sun website, the more you do something, the more natural it will become.

You could probably try asking in the Tilted Programming forum.

i took 6 hours of java during my freshman year and ran into the same problem you seem to have. i could wrap my mind around the concepts of what i wanted to happen but i could not translate that into keyboard strokes.

my advice: i ended up doing fairly well in there after i downloaded some open source simple java apps and scripts. find some easy ones that you KNOW what they're supposed to do and read how they accomplished it. it's basically reverse engineering their work in your mind... but it helped me out a lot. make sure to not copy their code... but no one will mind you learning from it.

Get a book from the library.
Compare the different ones, and try to find one with lots of tutorials and exercises (preferably with solutions provided).

Work through a chapter a night doing all of the tutorials and exercises. Don't just read the tutorials in the book, actually type them out and run them, making sure you understand each line as you go. Another thing which would help to make sure you understand what is going on is to try and write the program that is done in a tutorial in some other way. Even if you only change the program in a trivial way (e.g. change the program so the elements of an array are stored in the reverse order to the one in the book), it will help you understand exactly how the prgram works.

thank you all. im going to give it a try and hopefully get my head around all this coding.
cheers!

I would say just go to Barnes and Noble and look at java programming books. It took me about 4-6 weeks to become proficient at java. For some reason though, I can pick up programming languages quite quickly. I guess it's just the logic, syntax is usually the pain.

imho, the only way to really learn is by doing. start by typing in example programs you see in books and online. don't just cut-n-paste sample code, type it in yourself. get used to how the code looks and writes, and you'll begin to be able to think that way.

java tutorial on sun's website is a good place to start (bonus - it's free). then start buying books in areas you are interested in: swing (gui) devel, network programming, applets, graphics, etc.

oreilly's java enterprise bookshelf cd is available online (for now...):

http://www.unix.org.ua/orelly/java-ent/

"java in a nutshell" - available at the above link - is a good intro to someone with experience in other programming languages.

Get a Java Reference book and think of some form of program you want to write, and get to it. Its the only way.