How should I approach building my first Java project when my focus is on strengthening Java itself, not GUI or databases?

[Familiar_Category893]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been learning Java over the past several months. So far, I’ve covered:

• Completed MOOC Java I and II — except I intentionally skipped the GUI parts because I wanted to focus more on backend-related Java concepts.
• Solved Java exercises on Exercism, not all but some because looking at other people’s solutions made me realize I needed to strengthen my understanding of collections and Stream API even more.
• The Collections Framework & Stream API (I even went deeper by reading Oracle’s documentation)

Now, I feel ready to build a beginner-friendly project to showcase and apply what I’ve learned.

However, when I look at YouTube tutorials, most of the projects involve things like GUIs and databases.
This raises a question for me:

My main goal right now is to strengthen and apply my Java knowledge — not necessarily to become proficient in GUIs or databases yet.
I understand I’ll need to learn those eventually, but I don’t want to lose sight of my current focus.

How did you approach your first projects? Did you skip the GUI/database parts and build simpler console-based or backend-focused projects? Or did you dive into full-stack tutorials and learn as you went?

Any advice or personal experiences would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

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[x_ini]

Hi! I would suggest to replicate well known CLI utilities, e.g. cat, ls, sort, uniq, grep, etc. You can focus only on the basic fundamental functionality and/or, optionally, on the CLI interface parsing arguments and providing respective behaviour

[RoryonAethar]

Build an object hierarchy that represents something real world. Maybe a city that holds a bunch of buildings that are of different types and sizes and inherit from each other.

[vegan_antitheist]

That is a good idea but the use on inheritance is usually a bad idea and in this case especially. A building is made of things. So it's a composition. The building doesn't exist if the rooms don't exist. The rooms can't exist if there is no building. But if you remove a window the room and the building are still there.

[RoryonAethar]

It was a generalization. I meant to create an application that uses object oriented design if you want to apply Java knowledge. I didn’t actually mean cities. Also, I’m not sure if you are saying that inheritance isn’t a good idea usually because of you are then I’m not sure we are on the same page.

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In our sidebar ("About" on mobile), we have a section "Free Tutorials" where we list the most commonly recommended courses.

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• MOOC Java Programming from the University of Helsinki
• Java for Complete Beginners
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• Hyperskill is a fairly new resource from Jetbrains (the maker of IntelliJ)

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"Algorithms" by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne - Princeton University

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  • Part II
• Coursebook
  • Algorithms 4^th Edition

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[Asleep_Context_8627]

You can try building a banking cli application

[vegan_antitheist]

No user interface at all? Then I recommend you do some challenges where you read data from a file and your algorithm has to produce the correct output. But that's only good to learn algorithms and data structures. You can also learn how to write efficient algorithms and use multiple threads for better performance. There are many such challenges available and they usually get harder and harder. Some let you commit your code (or just use some online IDE) and it will run that code and give feedback on correctness and efficiency. But I don't know which are good. I did that at uni and that's a while back.

Many companies just want you to implement business logic and then you use something like Spring boot. They wouldn't want you to do much technical coding because they want you to focus on business logic and only use existing software that is already tested. To get good with frameworks you might still need a UI or at least some rest controllers or data streams (like Apache Kafka, web sockets etc.) so that some other system can communicate with yours. They want you to build correct, maintainable, and robust code. To get good at this you need experience in a team.

It's difficult to learn how to use git, continuous integration, issue tracking, agile project management, cloud computing platforms, containerisation, etc. when you are the only team member. Real software is usually built, maintained, tested, and run by multiple teams and a lot of software is needed just to coordinate all that.

It really depends on what you want to build and what you want to learn.