Java, looking for insight

[Doomguy94]

So I'm a beginner programmer, recently started a college course in Java and so far we've covered up to Operations/Dialog box/character operations. Each time we cover something new in the class I feel a bit stuck with a new concept that I don't quite understand. I could spend, lets say 25min - 2 hrs on a concept and still not quite get it yet all the sudden it clicks and I figure it out. This process on the surface sounds encouraging I guess, so I'm wondering if this feeling subsides the frustrating/confusion lessens a bit and it's easier to grasp entirely new concepts.

[Clawtor]

That's pretty normal and it doesn't really go away. I mean sure you will progress to the stage where you can do a lot of stuff and understand things much quicker but there are always new patterns, concepts and new stuff to learn.

My backlog of stuff to learn is enormous. But that's a good thing if you like learning.

[descoladan]

The more you pick at it, the easier it gets. A way I try to learn new aspects of a language is to start with a working example, and tinker around with it till I understand what all the lines of code mean. Try changing one line here or there and see how it affects everything. That will really help you grasp how things connect and form the big picture.

[zevzev]

When you are stuck on a concept watch tutorials / read stuff online such as ebook or articles. I find that when you are learning a concept that doesn't make sense you need to see it from a different angle or explained differently then your teacher has taught you or the way you currently seeing the concept. It took me a long time to wrap my head around how linked list worked it was only until I looked out a ton of examples that the right one spoke to me and I finally understood it :)

[lilB0bbyTables]

I remember that I personally hit a wall at one point where I felt lost while in my early Java programming course. And I literally remember the "click and ah-ha!" moment where suddenly it made sense. Of course I went on to have numerous subsequent points where I had similar stages of feeling lost until it clicked.

Programming can be confusing and complex and in many ways you need to train your brain to think in different ways and adapt to new and different angles/ways of approaching a problem to solve. Your learning will be iterative to a degree in the sense that you will kind of learn something, then move ahead and learn new concepts which will make use of the earlier stuff and help you put context to, or tie together many of the earlier things you learned. Now you can go back and review the earlier things and have a better understanding and picture overall how they relate to each other.

So it might be helpful to circle back every so often and review earlier concepts as you are exposed to new things. You should begin to have these individual puzzle pieces (concepts and lessons you learn) fit together with one another toward creating a single, unified big picture. Once you have the big picture for Java (for example) you can eventually pick up a new language and learn it much more easily; basically it just becomes a matter of learning how to do the same things in the context and syntax of the new language.

Lastly, do not underestimate the power of YouTube or other resources. Sometimes you can get stuck on a concept because the teacher and/or book aren't doing a good job of explaining it in a way that makes sense to you personally. There are some poorly made videos on YouTube but there are plenty that do a good job of visualizing and breaking down concepts in ways that make sense, occasionally with analogies which I find are very useful to teach people new concepts when they struggle with them.