What's the best way to get familiar with available classes?

[Mark Davitt]

With the vast number of classes now available in the language, what is the best way for new Java programmers to find the classes that would be most useful for their projects?

[Mahesh Panchananam]

Well, the best reference I can suggest is
http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/

what is the best way for new Java programmers to find the classes that would be most useful for their projects?

Everything is useful, but you need to know how efficiently you can use the features.
With good experience you will come to develop good programming skills.

Rgds
Mahesh PS

[Stephan van Hulst]

Mark, make sure that at least you know what classes are available in the java.lang, java.util and java.io packages. In particular, you should get plenty of practice using streams and collections.

Other packages and classes will come up as you need them. Usually when you're working on a project and you stumble into a problem that you don't know how to solve, you can search the web and it will often provide names of classes you can use.

Like Mahesh implied, practice is key.

[Wim Vanni]

Was it on this forum that I compared it to cooking? Being a real chef is about knowing the ingredients and how to combine them. I'll let you work out the rest of the allegory ..

*Tries an impression of the Swedish chef*

Wim

[KayCee Clark]

I think it helps to narrow down your focus to a subset when first learning Java.

The specific classes and areas of interest for the SCJP / OCJP exam objectives seem like a good place to start. The exam includes some essential I/O, Collections, utilities, Exceptions, and of course, the wrapper classes. ( I might have missed a few, but you get the idea. ) An SCJP preparation book can also help guide you with a little more detail, once you get an understanding of the basic language syntax.