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[timferius]

Ok, so I've decided to teach myself to program for a hobby, and I've decided to start with Java because, despite all the hate it gets, the first small projects I can see myself enjoying would be small Minecraft mods and such, which runs in Java, so Java.
Now, I've poked around briefly on google, and there are a lot of places that offer free courses and such to learn Java. however, with my general lower amounts of free time, I don't want to waste time learning Java from a piece of crap course. So I'm comming here to see if anyone knows of any courses/tutorials/whatever online that they've seen/used and found to be good. Keeping in mind I have no previous knowledge of programming (except for a crapyily taught course in highschool some 6 years ago, that I failed because it was being taught by the teacher who got his degree because he was a car mechanic. No offense to him or car mechanics, but why the hell would you put him in charge of a god damned programming class???).

[anzki4]

Well, I found the Finnish version of this pretty good, so the English one(linked) should be decent as well. If you want to, you can just read the material and do the exercises, or if you are using Netbeans-IDE and get a plugin (requires registration), you can take advantage of automatic code-testing. (Just follow the instructions on the page.)

[Il Palazzo]

I've only found this one recently, so I can't say anything about the quality or content, apart from it being from Stanford and looking good.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/course/programming-methodology/id495054181

[Arni]

I know, this is crazy but...
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/index.html
There is actually official tutorials! For free!
Also, for technical documentation
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/

Also concerning modding Minecraft...
We were promised a API! https://github.com/Mojang/Minecraft-API
Which has been dead for nearly a year now...

The community found some ways around, but it's not that comfortable as with an API

Good luck on your way

[timferius]

Answers! Thanks! I'm probably going to start reading up this weekend. On the API, I've been trying to figure out, what exactly is an API, and how does it improve modability?

[Arni]

API means Application programming interface which is, in less fancy wording, a couple of defined methods/classes you can call/extend to achieve things. So it's simpler to extend programs.
Hence, it would be simpler to mod Minecraft.
---
On a second thought, there is Bukkit. http://wiki.bukkit.org/Main_Page
It's also a API for Minecraft (not official, but hey, it's something to start with at least)

[mainiac]

http://www.codecademy.com/

Breaks it down into nice easy chunks that are oriented towards broader projects.  Best thing ever.

[timferius]

Slowly working my way through the Oracle tutorials first, figured the offical ones were a good place to start. There is a lot of stuff going on here, my head hurts a bit, but I think I'm starting to grasp the very basics at least.

[CR055H41RZ]

This could come in handy...

[timferius]

I've been working my way through the offical Java tutorials. They seem really good, though it's rather thick stuff. I'm skipping the more hands on excersizes for now (such as creating a Card and Deck class, and a program to generate them as objects) and just reading the answers. I want to get good at reading the code before I hit my head against writing it. I figure once I get through the lesson, I'll re read it with all the knowledge I've gained, and the earlier stuff will probably make more sense.
If I ever get through these I'll move on to other begginer tutorials for more practice and to further cement the knowledge. On the bright side, I get the general structure of the code at least (Class, Variables, Methods, Objects etc.) Although I didn't really understand interfaces, I assume I'll get to a more in depth section soon and it'll make more sense, as has happened for me for all the others so far.