Patrick van Zandbeek

Well, the JLS itself can be found here,

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/

both in online viewing mode and downloadable in several ways, including pdf.

Thanks Kristin,

I didn't know that. I do eventually plan on taking SCJD but that won't be any time soon, since SCJP will come first anyway, so I'll happily forget about the sun style guide for now then.

The weather around here will be different everyday. One day nice and warm, next day nothing but rain and wind. Sometimes even changes like that during the same day, 2 or 3 times even.

For someone from India I would guess that you will find the climate rather cold, though I'm sweating because of that same "cold" climate right now.

So basically, be prepared for anything, especially wind and rain. But probably some sun too

Well, like I said I prefer the cattle drive one better, it feels more natural to me and makes it easier to spot the coding blocks.

But I did learn myself to use the sun style so I would be used to it when I go to do the SCJP exam. Oh well, this way I get to get used to both, maybe I should put that on my resume? "Can use curly braces in multiple styles."

Well, I saddled up for the cattle drive and sent in my first assignment last night. Hope I come out nit free at the other end eventually

One quick question about the style guide though. Is there a good reason for the style guide to demand braces like this:
class BlahBlah
{
// cool code
}

instead of what sun thinks it should be and uses on all certification like this:
class BlahBlah {
// cool code
}

I personally like the first better, but in order to learn the sun way of doing things I was training myself to use (and dare I say it, like) the sun way of using the braces.

Congrats!

Scores don't get better than that.

Cool, don't know much about Jasper Reports. I do know a lot about SQL though and I understood "pure SQL" as meaning, without additional non SQL programming. If Jasper Reports gives you the additional functionality to run pieces of SQL multiple times, generate it dynamically or let you work with the result set then that could solve your problem. However, while I work a lot with reporting tools and SQL, I haven't worked with Jasper yet, so I could only guess here.

Hope you find the ideal solution

Personally I read in the quote a warning that the book was for beginners and that studying it doesn't give you 100 percent Java knowledge but much extra study was needed.

But I agree, if someone only takes 4 days to learn everything about Java and then only needs a couple of hours to pass the exam, great...
[ September 01, 2005: Message edited by: Mark Spritzler ]

Well, good luck, may your path to SCJP also lead to modesty.
[ September 01, 2005: Message edited by: Mark Spritzler ]

Originally posted by Brad Cantrell:
...Not being able to get programs to compile has been a major block in teaching myself to program...-Brad

I'm sorry to disagree. Not being able to get programs to compile is a very important phase in becoming a good programmer.

If you type over code from a book and it compiles and runs fine in one go, you will have learned a few things. If it doesn't compile however and you have to hunt for bugs and spend some, admittedly frustrating, time trying to get it to run and having to force yourself to really understand what is going on in the code and what all that compiler error gibberish means, then you will have learned a LOT.

good question

apparantly the ++ gets lost when you assign it to the same variable.
If you make an extra variable, j for instance and then say
j=i++;

j would be 10 and i would be 11 when printing after that.
Apparantly in i=i++; the ++ gets skipped after assigning i to i.

Having said that, i=i++ isn't what you want to be coding.
If you need to increment i just say i++; not i=i++;
or possibly i=i+1; if you can't live without an = sign.

Perhaps someone can explain more technically what happens during i+i++; but as far as I'm concerned, the bottom line is that you shouldn't write your code like that anyway.

You already have 2 threads about threads moved to the threads forum, this very day. Since you don't seem to understand why they were moved let me explain:
The threads forum is for threads about discussing threads and any threads related topics deserve their own thread in there.

That way, you save the nice people around here the work of manually moving them and you have a much bigger chance of the right people reading your question so they can help you. Everyone wins that way!

Yep, have madden 2005 as well but it just misses the spark espn has.

Can't get ncaa though, since there is no PAL version. From the sounds of it I'm not missing much though.

Ooh Elite! I forgot about that. Actually, it was Elite II on the Amiga that really did it for me. That deserves top pick as well. I was completely surprised by many sunrises while playing that.

tremendous amounts of blood?
Hacking off heads?

No no no, well maybe heads were hacked off but you didn't get to see that.

Sword of Aragon was a strategy kind of game, you begin in this city, could set basic taxes and choose what unit to build, nothing much else as I recall. You could then explore your surroundings in a turn based system. After you defended the city against goblins or something.

Now the really cool part is that the strategy game was very very good. You had units which could stack and work together, cavalry, wizard and priest characters that could use spells, all from top down perspective. Archers raining down wooden death from above on far off enemy units. Ah, sheer excellence.

The graphics weren't much, but the gameplay was unbeatable in it's genre.

From what I've seen happen around me there are only 2 reasons people can't be developers for more than 5 years or so.

1)
They don't really like programming and only started it because they think it paves the way to management and bossing people around. They either burn out or move along, though mostly not towards management in IT but usually some other field of work, like chef maybe, then again , that sounds like too much work.

2)
People that don't have a clue about programming and will never really learn either. They just bluff their way through stuff, stealing and copying code left and right and moving from project to project leaving only ruin and disaster behind. After a few years of covering up and quickly moving around, people will understand how bad they really are so before that they move on. Ironically enough, they usually end up in IT management positions instead of the people in group 1)

The rest let's call them group 3) since we're numbering anyway, can happily program until their dying breath.

Then again, these are just silly ramblings of someone that's been programming for 20 years now, so maybe you can't really program for long and my brains have been fried...