It has now been five days since I started this venture into Java. Looking back, it’s actually hard to categorize what I have learned. But I’ll try my best to recap a few of the things.

Listed in no particular order.

1. Plan your shit, use UML or Mindmaps. Draw stickmen illustrating your plan on a piece of paper, or draw it in the sand. It doesn’t matter how you do it, just do it. I can not express just how important this is. If I had been listing these things by importance, this would be on the very top, oh and it just happens to be at the top!

2. Object Oriented programming can be hard as hell, and is full of strange words, like Abstraction, Encapsulation and Exceptions.

3. Exceptions suck.

4. Learn how to use the debugger in Eclipse. It really sucks spending an hour trying to figure out why your application is crashing, only to find out you could have used the debugger to find out you had a null object. Yeah, I did that.

5. I’ll quote Eckel on this one. “A learning experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want”. I’ve found that to be true more often than not.

6. When you have something that works, look at your code, see if you can improve it. That way you will build on things you “know” and possibly find out that you don’t know them as well as you thought. You might not get where you want as quick, but at least you’re learning more, and this is what it’s all about. Eventually you will have to move on though. You can always come back to it.

7. When you’re stuck, step away from your computer, do something NOT related to computers at all. Approach the problem from a distance and there is a good chance you see things much clearer.

That’s all from me for now!