Hello World

3 weeks in.

My Java learning has begun, I bought an excellent book called “Head First into Java”  following a recommendation from a friend.I am continuing with the Stanford Youtube lectures on Programming Methodology as well as watching some other beginner tutorials.

I am through the “Hello World” stage – the standard “Well done you just created your first program!” part of tutorials that must have originated in the 80’s when making a computer print “Hello World” on screen was far more impressive.

I have decided to immerse myself in the world of ‘programming’ outside of my dedicated learning – for example; I have signed-up to Stack Overflow, started following and reading articles from relevant feeds on Twitter like Java Code Geeks and Hacker News.

Now what is daunting is that 99% of it makes no sense to me.

There is so much terminology, things like – API, Spring, Hibernate, JDBC, MySQL, Tomcat, PHP. I need to reassure myself that in 12 months-time I will know what all of this means – won’t I?

What’s my religion?

So if you want to be a programmer you need to choose a language. How do you decide which language to choose? This was my initial dilemma – it’s a bit like choosing a religion.

These seem to be the most common languages ; C, C++, C#, Objective C, Ruby, Python, Java and PHP to name a few.

I did a bit of research online – it seems like everyone’s got an opinion on which one is best – and, just like religious people – there are some extremists who denounce those who do not follow their chosen path.

I chose Java, why? Because my first lesson in programming came from a YouTube tutorial from Stanford University – Programming Methodology (CS106A) Lecture 1 –  delivered by the engaging Prof Mehran Sahami. This course  is about the fundamentals of programming and Prof Sahami uses Java as the language in this course.

The fact that Stanford records and posts it’s lectures online amazes me – I have access to a University standard education for free. This will come in very useful in my quest to learn to program.

An introduction

My Blog is designed to serve as a diary of my journey to become a self-taught proficient programmer within 12 months. I am 34 years old – I have very little knowledge in IT and apart from being fairly useful on MS Excel – I have no prior programming experience.