Learning Java again: Maven, Java15, var keyword, arrow functions
This is the first dev log after about two weeks, but of cause I was busy developing. Mostly, I am currently developing myself. And currently it is a lot about Java. In the Java area I don’t need to share my opinion to much. Because I am not an expert on Java. Finding opinions and even uninformed opinions, there are enough. And enough about java.
The headline say, learning Java again. Because this is not the first time I learn Java. It was back in 2005 2006 when besides by job education, visited an additional java LPIC-2 training class. However, at that time, I did not catch on to java. I it just did not seem practical to me. At university we also had classes where the practices needed to be done in java. There was one course with a J2EE project, an other one a multi window swing application.
Personally I just did not enjoyed java development. And professionally and personally, I got deep into node.js, today claiming to be an expert in this area. But recently it just got me back and I wanted to learn some more Java, because there are so many java projects out there. So I started learning java.
As my path, I choose to use java without big IDE. Yes I install all the java vs code extensions, but want to understand how all the command line tools work directly. On youtube I found this great comparisons of JDK vendors. I really like the idea behind adoptOpenJDK. Or cause I can’t tell if it is the best, however I like the idea of a stable standardized build version of the openJDK.
As I had the existing experiences with java, I did the Skill IQ test on Pluralsight and hit 162 points and with that beat 58% of java learners with just my very old knowledge. Now I am pretty good into the learning. Repeating the basics of syntax, collections, and other fundamentals. Now getting into reflections and generics (that I never used before in Java). Currently I play with the tooling. Try to understand the in and outs of maven.
On windows, installing all the tooling is still a pain in the ass. As I use cygwin as my terminal. and it can just not run mvn the maven command. However on linux, once on my web-server and on raspberry pi, the java and maven installation working well.
Besides learning Java, I also play some more with the raspberry pi. more on that in my next developer log.