Java (cafeine required)
The project I am on uses JSP with Javascript and a lot of CSS. I have always resisted learning Java, mostly for ethical reasons, but also because I had no use for it. I am a practical programmer and not one of those who can just learn a language for the fun of it. I need to do something with it. And no, writing a new word processor in Haskell or a web browser in Ruby is not my idea of actually doing something, that’s just insanity. But being asked to learn it for a new project was all the excuse I needed.
I must admit, Java isn’t that bad. As a language it isn’t too difficult to learn either. Knowing C++ gave me a leg up. But the server pages, oh! the server pages! So many fun things to know about that. Most of it makes sense once you figure it out. It’s the figuring out part that is the killer. As a real life, living, breathing programmer I have to ply my trade in a live environment, not just in theory. So sitting down and reading all the tomes, news groups, forums and web docs on the topic is simply not possible. For me learning a language is a lot like learning to skydive by throwing myself out of an aeroplane and figuring it out as I go. To extend the analogy a bit further would be to describe how I figured out the necessity of a parachute after the first five attempts. But one step at a time.
I have a safari account, but I couldn’t find anything that would really just give me the skinny on JSP. At least, not anything that struck my fancy. However, I did find Servlets and javaServer Pages by Jayson Falkner and Kevin Jones . And its FREE (as in beer)! It contains everything I would ever want to know about JSP, if I only had the time to read it. But I have started looking at various sections. It could use some polishing up, but for the most part it seems to be just what a JSP pro (which I ain’t) would want to read before starting a JSP project. Now, let’s see…does the parachute go on the back or the front? One way to find out…YEEEEHAAAAW!