My first address ...

My first ever address to freshers ........

Hello Everyone,

I would have personally liked to address you before the training kicks off, but as I had to fly to Japan, I have requested Mr. K to do the honor.

I underwent a corporate training for Java and J2EE back in 2004 when I was associated with a different employer. That’s when I met Mr. J, who was the trainer. For four days we talked at length from OOP concepts to Reflections and that was indeed an enlightening experience.

I was on the interview panel and I found some common misunderstanding of concepts amongst the candidates that I interviewed. That is the reason I why I to take this opportunity to share some of my experiences specifically with Mr. J and generally with “How to make the most from the training session”. These are some of my cheat sheets and it is not an obligation for you all to follow these steps in case our views differ.

Concepts: The most important and fundamental key to be good developer is to have your concepts clear. This training course is not similar to the commercial ones available in the markets where they teach you the syntactically legal constructs of writing Java/C++ programs. We have tailored the course contents to put more emphasis on topics that we feel should be discussed at length. Ask as many questions that arise in your mind and follow a simple principal “No question is stupid, no question is pathetic”. Once the concepts are clear, writing code will be very simple.

I would like to emphasize that you all put enough efforts to get the OOP concepts crystal clear by the time you all finish with the training. This was one thing in common that I found most of you lacked.

Implementation: The exercises given during the training need to be essentially carried out individually rather than in groups. Try to relate what you are typing. Don’t feel shy to ask Mr. J when you get confused over what really has to be done. I bet Mr. J will never spoon feed any of you; so try to give your best shot. Remember, once you get on with the projects, you will be all alone. I feel this is the best time when you all can start cranking up your debugging skills, imagination as to how the code might be working internally and so on. Try to squeeze as much information from Mr. J as possible. This includes best implementation practices, code reuse, how to decide the best fit java classes for a particular functionality when we need to make a choice from couple of types available at hand etc.

Post training: It will be good if you all can read some more literature after every session. Google.com is one unlimited source of information and “Complete Reference by Herbert Schields” is another ready reference. Read this book in parallel to the training and get your doubts cleared if you find a discrepancy between what is written and what was taught. It often happens that the wording in the book misleads us to believe in something that is actually not true. Be careful.

Mr. J: He is a well read and a no nonsense guy. I bet you won’t feel sleepy or bored during any of his lectures as he makes the discourses humorous enough. Try to understand the similarities and differences when he compares two technologies or the implementations in different technologies. Make ample notes from his presentations, specifically the definitions or different terms, java tenets, java constraints and so forth. They have proved very helpful to me in the long run. Take his assignments seriously as the feedback he provides on the implementation is genuine enough, it will train your mind while coding and also improve writing good performance code in the first shot. Trust me, you will be able to make a lot of use of these assignments when you come aboard on live projects. If time permits try to go the extra mile to implement additional features that might be discussed in the class.

Last but not the least. We are all here to help you out in case you are stuck with some implementation and Pankaj is not around. But don’t just get someone to fix the code and leave, try and understand the logic behind fix. The bottom line to successful coding is having the right logic in place as after that its only the semantics that have to be followed.