Mark Freeman

Uninstal the aplication from the device you are loading it to. I sometimes get this if the version on my phone conflicts with the one I am launching through eclipse.

Hi Kenny. Welcome to JavaRanch. You will love it here. I've found everyone to be very helpful and this place was one of the key reasons for me passing my SCJP last year.

You are certainly not alone in being stuck. Even with my development experience at my current job, the economic situation of the company keeps me from moving forward. Now is a great time to build some chops. I hope you are able to get something out of my blog and you are always welcome to message me if you just want to chat about ways get some experience. I'm definitely up for hearing what other people are doing to get pas this situation.

In your current situation, do you work closely with your programmers? When I started picking up Java on the job, I got close to a couple of developers who were willing to help me learn some things and answer questions when I got stuck. I then asked to be able to set up an IDE so I could begin reading the code. Eventually I started making small mods and fixes for customers. Depending on your situation, maybe you can push a little and see what they will let you do?

Mark

Hi everyone. I recently asked some questions on here on what a good direction is for technologies to study in which stay current. I really appreciate the responses and how helpful the community is here. I'm one of those folks that is stuck in the dreaded catch 22, where you don't have the experience to get the job to get the experience. It's a tough position to be in, but there are definite suggestions for how to break free of this.

I've started a new personal project to use all of my motivation and passion to make this work. With enough effort, I believe getting the experience through open source and non-profit volunteer work, may be the direction needed. I've started a blog to document my journey and hopefully help some other folks along the way. If you are in this same position and have something that is working, or if you have suggestions for projects that need assistance, feel free to post it here or message me. I'm hoping my experience helps me, as well as the greater community of those stuck in this position.

http://breaking-catch22.com/

Mark

Thank you Bear. That certainly helps give me a little direction.

Hello everyone. I'm looking for some advice on where to put my focus learning. I'm currently working as a Jr Developer/Business Analyst at a software company. A year ago, I got my SCJP5 with the expectation that I would be moving to into a full time development position. Unfortunately, the economy tanked and I spend very little time coding and almost all of my time continuing to work as an analyst. My goal is to make it over this economy hump and likely look for a new position. I'm curious what you folks thing good areas of focus are in learning. I have little to show for my experience thus far. I understand I need to write some apps to show off and find a nice open source project to work on, but where would you put your focus? So far, all of my experience is basic J2EE with heavy use of Swing. I'm very comfortable with SQL, so I've recently started spending some time to learn the new JPA API. Is the web stack THE place to put your focus? It seems everything is moving that way and I know very little about that area.

Thanks for any advice you all may have in giving me a little nudge in the right direction.
Mark

Hey everyone. I'm looking for a good suggestion for books with info on building JDBC enabled applications. I'm not a beginner with Java, but my experience has been limited to using some API's others have built (at work) or in studying for my SCJP. I would love it if it was more than just a JDBC book, but that is my first priority. Suggestions?
[ November 09, 2008: Message edited by: Mark Freeman ]

hi Deepak. I found them to be quite similar with regards to difficulty.

If you got 42 questions correct and failed to answer 20, you will kill it next time. Just remember to trust yourself and drive forward and get them all answered. You can always come back and review your answers (Careful on the drag and drop as it deletes your original answer when you check it). Don't get tied up into getting the highest score and focus on passing.

Just a quick note that I took and passed the SCJP 5 exam this morning. A huge thanks to this board, the K&B book and WhizLabs prep test.

Mark Freeman <-- who is one happy man today.

I think you will find their mock exams highly recommended and worth the cost. That isn't to say that you need them, but they are nice (and hard ).

r1 and r4 appear before pre, since they are part of static init blocks in Raptor. They execute as soon as the class is loaded, even without an instance being created. Note that Hawk extends Raptor, so the Raptor class is loaded when you ran "java Hawk" from the command line.

I just want to reiterate what John said. You have probably heard this a million times, but it deserves to be said again. Use notepad or vim (without code highlighting). Do not use an IDE when practicing. A programmer at my office suggested that I don't even touch eclipse until after I pass the exam. I can't tell you how much it has helped me. It forces you to really understand the syntax rather than the IDE doing all the work.

Mark

This may not make a difference (I am not where I can test it), however, have you tried flush() outside of the loop? If I understand the purpose of flush() correctly, it flushes the buffer. I would want to do this just once, after I am finished writing everthing out. It seems worth a try.

It looks like you need to flush the output and close the file. After your loop code block containing this line:

writer.write(i);

add

writer.flush(); writer.close();

it wouldn't be bad to close() reader either.
[ July 01, 2008: Message edited by: Mark Freeman ]

I have the Whizlabs test and they are very good. I am not very impressed with the video training though. It is basically someone reading you a slide presentation.