99 Bottles, IDE Tools & Back To CodeAcademy

It's a good thing I made that blog post yesterday, because after sleeping, eating, working, and sitting around on my couch for 23 hours in between sessions, I basically forgot how to function. After a quick CMD refresher, I was off and running again.

Over the past week I've worked through the Programming 101: 5 Basic Concepts Of Any Programming Language blog posts and podcast episodes, as well as 14 real-life pages of Head First Java (HF). The latter of these is proving to be my preferred Java learning mechanism to this point, though I appreciate the modern multimedia offerings and greater programming foundation-building of the former; it remains to be seen if they can coexist.

The outcome of today's HFJ lesson was reproducing the "99 Bottles of Beer" song lyrics in CMD (left), and spotting and correcting a basic grammar error produced by the code, and I legitimately enjoyed the task.
Previously I downloaded Notepad++ at the recommendation of the helpful site I used to set myself up in JDK as an upgrade to the standard Notepad text editor, and used it to create the beautiful program you see here. However, learning to operate and adapt quickly to true Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) will likely be professionally important. How to Program with Java (HP) recommends the SpringSource Tool Suite, which will be used by default in the lessons going forward. CodeAcademy (CA) recommends IntelliJ Idea in its Introductory Java course. I chose the latter, which not only feels more intuitive and seems to have more available help online.

I'm still very uncomfortable using it, but I understand at a minimum how to make it test-run my programs. I see how it can be helpful, and will essentially force myself to use it.

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As a side note, I had cast CA aside for awhile; a couple weeks back I attempted the introductory course and very quickly became very intimidated. But, after the past week's studying, I've gone back and am very appreciative for the course and CA's style and approach in general. The individual courses are longer and much more jam-packed than that of the other two venues I'm using, so it may be the most intermittent as settling in for a lesson will require some planning.