On Feb 12, 5:25 am, ThL <t-l-a-r-i-v-i-e-r-e-sanslestir...@n-o-r-d-n-e-
t.ft> wrote:
...

I tend to avoid books.  The Java Tutorial and
the JavaDocs (both available freely from Sun)
combined with a bit of searching for specific
topics, tends to do for my purposes.

OTOH
- I would avoid any book that ends with
'..for Dummies'
- Someone who's opinion I respect, loves books
and has reviewed many - you might find just the
right book at their review page..
<http://www.techbookreport.com/JavaIndex.html>

I am no 'language expert' and have no
experience with VB.  It seems Lew went
covered the entire area better than I
ever could, in any case.

Having said that, I will add that I like
Java for the following basic reasons.

- Cross-platform, or 'X-plat' (VB/.NET is
supposed to be available on different
platforms, AFAIU, but it is nowhere near
as easy to produce an X-plat GUI).
- Good documentation from the manufacturer
(the JavaDocs and Java Tutorial alone make
for good docs., but there is also available:-
the language spec., the source..).
- Lots of free tools for development
(NetBeans, Eclipse, JBuilder community
edition..) and the SDK itself is also
free 'bar the bytes to download it'.
- Huge repository of pluggable API's.
- Huge repository of LGPL code.
- The Plug-In required to run a Java
based project is both supplied freely
by Sun (for Windows, at least) and
updated as a matter of priority,
should a security bug be discovered.
As a result, I can confidently recommend
it to my end users.
- Excellent usenet newsgroups devoted to
discussing Java and Java based development.

Anything I forgot?  Probably a great deal..

Andrew T.

I recommend one of Terry Terd's "Java 2 for Retentives," Carrie
Curd's "Java 2 for Telepaths," or Bruce Eckel's "Thinking in
Java."

No easy answer. Parts of Java are so much easier to learn than Basic or C/C++,
other parts are so much harder, the bulk is about the same.

"Real programmers can program in FORTRAN in any language." (source unknown)

If you understand software development and programming principles,
particularly object-oriented programming, particularly polymorphism, then you
will learn how to use Java very quickly. (One week is not uncommon.) Likewise,
you can spend the rest of your life learning it and never really master it.
(Eight years and counting, in my case, and that only since I started getting a
paycheck for it. More like eleven years if you count when I started learning
Java.)

It's more than knowing the language. The APIs are vital and monstrously
extensive, and that's just core Java without any additional acronyms (JEE,
JWS, JMS, JMX, ...) or third-party products.

I spend half my professional life learning what I'm doing. That was true for
C, C++ and FORTRAN as well, and remains true for SQL and other languages, as
well as everything else in this profession.

The syntax between Java, C++ and C# is very similar, enough to really mess you
up as you switch between them, because "similar" also means "different".
Smalltalk and JORF [1] are also object-oriented but differ from the Algolish
world rather sharply. FoxPro is object-oriented, too. You cannot generalize
difficulty just from that attribute.

I am familiar with C++ and Java, less so with C#. I rate C++ as "more
difficult" than Java, and what I know of C# puts it on a par with Java. That's
just me, of course.

[1] an obscure, nearly private object-oriented language from the 80s, named
after a goat.
<http://www.pycs.net/lateral/weblog/2005/12/20.html>

- Lew

If you were learning to _read_ the two languages you would find VB.Net
a little easier because you are used to the BASIC syntax but the
difference would not be significant. Both are object oriented and you
will have to learn to think in that idiom.

To my mind there are two big differences in writing the two languages.

1. Java is much older than VB.Net. There is a huge body of code in the
form of Java libraries. This has the advantage that somebody has
probably already written the code you need but makes it difficult to
find exactly which method you should use. The problem is compounded by
the necessity for backward compatibility which means there are often
several ways to achieve the same result and it can be difficult for a
beginner to determine the "current" way.

2. VB.Net has only one development environment. That means that all
the code you read and all the instructions you find on the Web will
work as expected. If they say choose the xyz menu, select abc and
paste this code it will work. Java has dozens of different development
environments so that most examples and tutorials are designed for none
of them.

The comparison often ends up with command line Java versus the VB.Net
IDE. On that basis it would take an hour to get "Hello World" to
appear in the middle of the window in VB and a week in Java.

In my first post I "instructed" you to download the NetBeans/Java SDK
bundle. Comparing that to VB.Net it might take two hours to get "Hello
World" to appear in the middle of the window but, unlike VB, when you
resize the window your text will stay in the middle!

NetBeans will also help with the library problem above. When you cut
and paste some code from the Web into your program NetBeans will
usually provide the code you need to include it.

-
So, to guess a quantative answer to your first question, I would go
for twice as hard if you use any of the IDEs I list at
<http://ide.profectus.com.au> and your application does not use one of
the thousands of methods that are available in Java but not in VB.Net.

C# 3.0 is not GA yet.

(.NET 3.0 uses C# 2.0 while C# 3.0 will come with .NET 3.5 according
to the MS numerologists)

When C# 3.0 is GA maybe Java 7 may be GA too and maybe with closures as
well.

Arne

The difference between VB.NET and Java in way to work is rather small.

VB.NET is not VB7 - it is C# with VB syntax.

For the specific purpose which may require tight integration
with OS specific components the MS route be quicker.

But in general I do buy the argument that Java is harder to
get started with than VB.NET.

Arne