What Courses to Study to Learn Java and Become a Java Developer?

What courses do you need to study to become a Java programmer? Let’s talk about that today.

The question was, “What courses should you take if you want to learn Java or if you want to become a Java programmer?” Well, we all had to start from somewhere, no one’s born a programmer, so you need to take a basic Java course. I’ve got two examples. I’ve got two Java courses to get you started; a Java crash course and a Java masterclass. The Java crash course is a short and sharp course, it’s much smaller than the masterclass, and it’s aimed to give you the basic skills of Java in the shortest amount of time. Or you can go to a masterclass, which is 70-plus hours of training to really give you a solid grounding.

Now, I’m not necessarily saying everybody needs to take my courses, but you’ll need to start with a course of that nature to give you basic understanding of the Java syntax and basic Java skills. From there, what I recommend you do, is actually look at an intermediate or an advanced Java course. Probably not advanced, but more intermediate thing, because you’ve just come off a beginners’ course. I’d be looking at something that’s gonna teach you more about data structures, and something that will teach you more about algorithms, ’cause they are two good skills or areas that you need to master so that you can become a good Java programmer in any field. So definitely data structures and algorithms are two important things.

Another great thing to learn is design patterns. Now, design patterns are shortcuts or templates effectively, to give you a shortcut on solving common problems in computing. So if you understand design patterns, like data structures and having a mastery of design patterns and algorithms, they give you good generic skills you can apply to any project, whether it’s gaming, business apps, or whatever it is, if you’ve got these skills, you can apply them to those projects. So I would recommend you stick to those areas first before you go into a specific area like say Android app development. Once you’ve got your basic Java skills, you’ve got your design patterns skills, you’ve got your algorithms and data structures, you’ve mastered those or feel very confident with those, I think that’s a good time to now start specializing.

Specializing in a sense of taking a specific course on a specific technology. Now, you’ve got lots of choices here with Java. One of the things you could do is look at gaming. So you can look at Android app development, Android gaming development, or writing apps in Java for the Android platform. I’ve actually got a gaming course, a Java Androidcourse, to help you if wanna get into that area, but you might just prefer to get into Android apps, and you can do that with Java as well.

I’ve got an Android app development course, which isn’t gaming-specific, which is app-specific. App development in general is a good area that you can specialize in and there’s lots of good job opportunities there as well. So that’s the gaming side and the app side of things. Another area you can get into is Java Enterprise (JEE, Java Enterprise Edition). Now this is categorized as things like writing apps that do things on the back end of a web browser. So in other words, when you’re on a website and you’re filling in a loan application or something like that, there’s usually a program running on the server at the bank, or whatever the website, wherever that’s hosted, that does some processing. So it might save your calculations for your loan application or whatever the case might be, or perform some other processing. So a good area to get into is that type of coding, because it is used by a lot of the Fortune 500 companies, and lots of large companies have Java infrastructure, and Java Enterprise Edition developers get paid very well. So that’s another good area to get into, and there’s a few areas you can look at there.

I’ve got a Java Spring course, a Spring Framework course, and that uses Java, and Spring again is, basically enables you to get into that enterprise space to actually write apps. I’ve also got a generic Java Enterprise course as well, where you can actually go through and learn what Java Enterprise is, and start using the specific Java things that Oracle have actually produced and have got out there. They’re good areas to get into as well, because they’re gonna look really good on your resume.

Now, there’s lots of other areas. You can get into embedded programming and all sorts of other things like that, but they’re probably not gonna give you as many opportunities as these other common areas. You know, basically the mobile app development, mobile app/game development, but also the Java Enterprise Edition. They’re two really good areas to get into, and because you’ve already started off and you’ve got a basic grounding in Java, you’re actually gonna be well suited to getting into any area of Java, because any area that uses Java as a programming language, because you understand, you’ve been through the process and you now know the basics of Java programming, and you can apply that to any field.

So in other words, you go into say, artificial intelligence or machine learning, if you’ve already got good solid Java skills, you don’t have to waste time learning the syntax of the language, you can just focus on learning the specifics, you know, artificial intelligence, machine learning, whatever it is, for that area. So it can be good to look at some of those other areas and figure out whether that’s something that is of interest to you, but I would say don’t get into those yet. Learn the basics, give yourself some good, well-rounded Java skills, and you can now apply that into whatever field you want to.

I hope that helped. If you’ve got any questions, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.