How and where did I start?

by arjan Courses

There are several ways to learn a programming language. If done as part of education or job, you will probably go to a professional training. With a group of (mostly) motivated participants in face2face full day training sessions for several weeks or months.

From the start it was clear this wasn’t the way to go for me. Programming in Java is not my job, so I will do it mainly in my own time, when social life permits. I really need to chew the monster in little parts. Considering this, for me two main options remained:

  1. Make my own course collecting tutorials and primers available online
  2. Follow an online commercial “Java start-to-end” course

Option 1 is very flexible and completely free of course. I did find some very good tutorials, but in practice it is hard to find a coherent set of tutorials that also have the right level of complexity. And it gets harder if you want the tutorials to be well taught too (yes, there are many tutorials in very badly pronounced English, with too small letters, not explaining important concepts etc…)

This left option 2 for me. I already had some experience with courses on Udemy (https://udemy.com), so I started searching there.

TIP: Always wait until there is a good price offer on a training platform like Udemy, usually every few weeks. Even the most extensive training will only cost between 10 and 20 Euro’s when bought at the right moment!

Searching Java on Udemy gets 10.000 hits, again choices had to to be made. I tried to limit my query to just the “complete Java” courses. And finally I did some checks for the top high scoring trainings:

  • Does the table of contents look logic and understandable ?
  • Does the course cover basics but also advanced topics?
  • How many students have participated and what what kind of review comments do students give?
  • MOST IMPORTANT: Check the sample videos: do I like how the teacher presents the training, is his voice and intonation OK? I have to spend many hours watching video’s of the trainer, impossible if I get irritated by a teaching style.

Finally decided to purchase “Java Programming Masterclass (Java 11 & Java 17)” by Tim Buchalka at Udemy.com (https://www.udemy.com/course/java-the-complete-java-developer-course/) for EUR 16,99. Approximately 80 hours of video, 21+ chapters, many challenges and coding exercises. I have finished 3 chapters so far and I still like it.

The game is on!