Java has become much more complicated over the years. I started working with the language back in 2000. I’d been a database developer for a couple of years, working with Oracle, but wanted to create more general applications. I learned enough to pass my first Java job interview with two books: Laura Lemay’s Teach Yourself Java in 21 days (which had been recently revised for Java 2!) and the first half of Wrox’s Professional Java Server Programming.
Together, these two books contained most of the Java knowledge I needed to do my job. I quickly picked up a lot of other things like CVS and Unix, but Java was definitely a lot simpler back then. I would say that the Java I needed as a professional developer back then included :
- Core Java
- JDBC
- MySQL
- HTML
- CVS
The builds were done through makefiles if they were scripted at all. It was fairly easy for a new developer to get working professionally. I mean, two books contained most of the information you needed – along information on how to do graphics, animation and applets. And the Wrox book also found time to cram in chapters on esoterica like Jini and Javaspaces. You could learn a lot of Java in 21 days.
(I wish I still had my old copies of these books. Living in Brighton involved moving frequently between small rooms and a lot of books had to be abandoned).
Over the last 15 years Core Java has become more complicated. The addition of things like generics and lambdas were much needed but make the language much more complicated. And the basic skills a developer needs where I’ve worked recently are much more complicated:
- Core Java
- Eclipse or equivalent IDE
- Hibernate
- MySQL
- HTML
- XML/JSON
- REST
- Junit and a mocking framework
- git
- Maven
- Spring
The applications that can be built with modern Java are impressive and far beyond the scale of what would have been possible in 2000. I think it would be impossible now to write any large scale Java application without a decent IDE. And Java is much more complicated than before.
A lot has improved too, and it’s great to escape the horrors of classpath config, which has disappeared in place of easier options. But the point remains: I know a fair few people who learned to code under their own steam and ended up with successful careers. I imagine that is much more difficult nowadays. Back in 2000, applets were an easy way to learn to code and you could get going with notepad and a compiler. Modern Java is probably not a good beginner’s language.