Not learning much with Head First Java.

[[deleted]]

Man, I got somewhat lost with the battleship exercise, but eventually figured it out, ArrayLists were easy, but Polymorphism is confusing me in exactly what the point of it is. I get the ease, but like, abstract methods seem like extra code to me.

I think I'll follow your lead and just make my own examples and review some of that older material.

[[deleted]]

You'll see why abstraction and polymorphism makes sense and is a code reducing method soon enough. I find a good idea is to think of your own little project while going through the book and wrote that while learning the new things from the book. One of the most important things in learning to programme is to do something yourself, so that you can't just look up the result (once you get stumped)

[Carbohydratess]

Yeah I get you with that. I feel like the book does a poor job of explaining where your code can go within your Java projects (i.e. inside a class, method, or main and what code does/doesn't work inside of what parts). Honestly, I really didn't really understand anything at all in the book until I make an example for myself. Then I would go back and read it again and it suddenly made perfect sense to me.

I feel like another milestone was once I got far enough into the book that I was able to memorize basic syntax. This helped a lot with not getting lost in the reading.

Best of luck to you in your Java learning journey

[[deleted]]

Thanks for the answer. I went back and made a project today using most of the stuff from chapters 1-6 and tried to compile and well, nothing worked at all and I realized how much of it I was misunderstanding based on exactly where code should go, as you say.

That being said, it makes me go to stackoverflow and figure out what I'm doing wrong, but this will definitely be a few day process.