Janet Wilson

Originally posted by Mark Howard:

But I digress from the main import of this thread, which was the success being enjoyed by this Javaranch site.
Again, well done Paul and all others involved

Hear! Hear! Let's raise those glasses! A toast (or english muffin, or tortilla, or ?? ) to JavaRanch!!! It is well deserved! Congrats to EVERYONE who helps out! Ya' did good!

Originally posted by Thomas Paul:
Find the good restaraunts.

I'm with you on this one! Along those lines..locate the "cheap eats" because you don't have to spend a lot of money to get good food. Spend time searching the local newspaper's website.
Locate the cultural happenings. Act like a native.
Janet

Find out how to use the phone system.
There is nothing more embarrassing then trying to transfer someone and accidentally hanging up...

And find out how to change the voicemail of the person who was sitting at your new office/desk/cubicle/whatever!
4. Get the org chart.
5. Determine how thin the walls are.
6. Find out about the email and internet policy.
7. Begin by not trusting anyone (am I a cynic or have I been burnt before?)

Just remember guys...it's quality not quantity! Age is ONLY a number. Jerks (male and female) come in all ages. Whenever a person no longer feels like "playing" the game of life (and I don't mean the board game) but "living" the game of life then they become attractive.
Oh, I could go on, but I'll stop.
Janet (probably one of the "older" ones hangin' out at the Ranch from time to time)

Lets see, I should be about 9 . . . well let's not go into details

Don't worry Cindy - I'm not far behind you!
Elite runner? Ha! I run after my 2 & 4 year olds out of necessiry sometimes - what do you call that?
Janet

Thanks for the additional info Dirk!
Janet

Dirk,
As usual - thanks!
I might even beat you to it because we've found all sorts of information concerning this:
IBM's Alphaworks BigDecimal Overview
IBM's General Decimal Arithmetic (contains many links)
IEEE 754-1985: Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic
IEEE 854-1987: Standard for Radix-Independent Floating-Point Arithmetic
What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic
It still just struck us as being odd that coverage isn't at least "strongly" mentioned. Please add your links if they are not amongst these.
Thanks! Janet
P.S.-Credit to "JJ" at my work for the links.

We ran up against a rounding "problem" in Java which we were unaware of. We have since discovered that if we want exact results we need to use the BigDecimal API or we could use int or long if we want to keep track of the decimal (look at Joshua Bloch's item #31 in "Effective Java").
However, my post isn't technical, per se. We (there's 2 of us at my job who are really curious about this) are surprised at the dearth of literature concerning this topic and was wondering if we were somehow snoozing during the beginner's coverage on the Sun site or if they only talk about this problem in formal classes or ??? I would think this topic would be covered extensively in a beginner's guide under their "gotcha's section"? Are there any other gotcha's (besides what Joshua Bloch uncovers in his book) one should be aware of?
Could someone explain why there is little written about this topic?
Thanks in advance for enlightening me.
Janet
P.S.-I thought it was funny that at the JavaOne 2003 conference they are offering a session called: BigInteger, BigDecimal, and a Billion of digits of Pi (ts-1991)

Samira,
Don't forget to look at the Bunkhouse for reviews of books!JSP Bunkhouse reviews
You might also want to use amazon's reviews to validate the rating, too. I look at the low marks to see why someone didn't like a book.
Good Luck! Janet

Thomas - I appreciate your response. Being an experienced instructor, did you find I was grossly missing any areas I should cover on my whirlwind tour of J2EE?
Thanks! Janet

Thanks for your help Christian.
Anyone else?
Janet

Femi,
You may want to keep an eye out for the resonses to my posting re: a training plan for J2EE because I wasn't happy with Sun's training for J2SE and I'm not overly impressed with Sun's approach with the J2EE, either. It seems like there's not enough explaining what I am doing / why I am doing this / and what other options do I have, etc. My posting is: Need help with Study order for learning J2EE
I'm sure you know all the usual sources to look for java information, but if I stumble on something that is good and obscure, I'll make another posting.
Happy learning!
Janet
P.S.-I've been very successful at obtaining several books from amazon's used book resellers for MANY $ off, in case money is an issue.

Wow - thanks for the responses from Chris, Manjunath and Simon - I appreciate it.
Of course, I have more questions, perhaps somewhat directed to Chris, but open to everyone's opinions....
1. If I want to give the somewhat "well-rounded tour (showing client and server side)" of J2EE for developers for the purpose of giving them the opportunity to decide which "side" they would like to pursue further training on, then would it make sense to include the HTML & Javascript since I did not cover this when I developed my J2SE plan? Isn't this sort of essential to understand/appreciate servlets and JSP? Is there something better?
2. Is there a good reference you would recommend for reviewing the packaging and deployment? I was figuring on covering this somewhat along the way using deploytool and Ant but I am a beginner myself (we don't have anyone on staff with the knowledge, but at least I have done some training development) so am I missing something?
3. Ok, so here is Chris' list:
1. Basic Java Introduction
2. HTML and Javascript
3. General J2EE Overview
4. JDBC
5. Servlets
6. JSP
7. JNDI
8. EJB
9. JMS
10. More EJB
11. Design Patterns
12. J2EE Patterns
And, now my questions....
a) What kind of basic java introduction? We're moving directly from the J2SE training plan into this one. Therefore, could this be dropped?
b) If I move JDBC to immediately after Servlets and JSP, where would I want to cover RMI? At the same time as JDBC or before the servlets/JSP?
As usual - thanks for ANY assistance with this!
Janet

And to add even more, there was an extensive primer I retrieved from the www.learningpatterns.com site called: "The Developer's Guide to Understanding EJB 2.0" which might be worthwhile to retrieve. Of course besides the other usual sites (sun, javaworld, ibm, etc.) you might want to look at oreilly, too.
Good Luck! Janet

Hi folks,
I need some help from the experienced J2EE developers out there. I am putting together a training plan to learn J2EE now that I've completed putting together something to learn J2SE. I am having a hard time deciding which order to study selected J2EE topics for my group. I want to provide everyone with a well-rounded overview of both the client-side and server-side topics, then we'll get into Websphere specific issues, etc.
So far, this was the order of topics I was going to cover.
1. General J2EE Overview
2. JavaBeans 101 using the BDK
3. EJB
4. HTML
5. Javascript
6. Servlets
7. JSP
8. JDBC
9. More EJB
10. JMS
11. JNDI
12. J2EE Patterns
Note: I did not cover beans, applets, or spend alot of time with Swing/AWT in my J2SE training plan, but I did cover JDBC.
Is this in the right order? Are there other topics I should cover for this 1st pass? As usual, all assistance is greatly appreciated!
Janet