David Johns

Do you have any suggestions for a good way for a Java developer to learn Go?  Parts of the company are using Go with Docker, I'm looking for a good way to learn the language and capabilities coming from a Java background, and to make sure I understand the best practices for Go.

Thanks for the reply.

When you say take up a tool project, are you referring to just working on a project for a Java tool for my own edification, or working on some common project?

Also, when reviewing books like "clean code" or "effective java", now that there are major changes in Java 8, do the books lose any of their relevancy because they don't incorporate the latest tools (like lambdas and streams). Sometimes getting started investing time in a book or process that seems to be continually outdated keeps stalling out my motivation for continuing down one of those paths.

I have mostly been working in Java 6, (started with 1.4) over the last several years. In the last few years, I have been using Java lightly for my projects. One of my goals for this year is to bring my java skills up to date, esp. learning what is available with Java 8. I find that I need something to focus on for that. It seems like working on one of the Java Certifications will give me that focus. My question is which exam would be a good place to start, and what areas would be best to improve my overall coding style. I would like to have a better understanding of best practices and patterns to make sure that I am writing effective, maintainable and readable code.

I am trying to print a .pdf file using PDFBox. Inside our app we are
running an old version (0.7.3). One of our users said that they cannot
print PDF's with an image inside the file, it just leaves the image out.
So I am looking to upgrade our app to 1.6.0. However when I attempt to
run PDFBox in command mode to print the .pdf file, it stops where the
image is located (in the header) and does not print anything on the page
other than the first part of the header underline. I have a second PDF
file with an image and it just doesn't print the image but prints all of
the text.

I am running on a Windows 7 64 bit machine. I am just running this from
the command line, although I have the same problem when running with
1.6.0 through our application.

The image was generated by creating a Birt Report sent to PDF. I attempted to attach a .pdf file but the forum would not allow me to attach a .pdf file (or a .zip) file as an attachment.

Any ideas on why the image is not printing and how to get it to print? Also, does anyone have suggestions if there is another/better way to print a .pdf stream to a printer inside my java app?

Any help or direction on the issue would be greatly appreciated.

David Johns
Software Engineer
Columbia Ultimate