hi /g/ I wanna stop being a useless piece of shit I've been

>>60030756
/g/ isn't any better than your life, anon
trust me

>>60030756
ALWAYS read from Apress publication

>>60030756
>I know I can just google it, but I figured checking with you guys first could be helpful

Well you'll google a shit ton in learning a language, don't see why you wouldn't start now.

>>60030824
>>checking with you guys first could be helpful

Order old programming books off Amazon. Anything from 80s or 90s should be fine.

New programming books and resources fucking suck, take you to the point where you can write a text adventure game, and never follow up shit because that's where it actually takes effort to teach programming.

Older books are actually written to teach engineers the techniques and concepts they need to know, whereas new books are written by publishers to make money, and anything online is low-effort content by self-aggrandizing fucks. New books written for engineers tend to be feature dumps, are great resources, but shit for teaching yourself.

Learn x the Hard Way is fucking terrible and great example of this, "lolz I taught the ez stuff now just google to learn more!" Not a bad introduction to the language(s), but it doesn't teach programming.

SICP is a great place to start if you're a STEM-type. K&R is good for anyone, but then promptly abandon C unless you're interested in Linux programming (and then you should feel bad for that). These are the books I used for self-teaching, so I don't really know what else is good for a beginner other than all the new(er) books were fucking useless.

After SICP/K&R/whatever then go ahead and find some "classic" books on more advanced topics. Try them even if you don't understand them -- the holes in your understanding will be filled in later, and you can revisit the books for more understanding later. At this point you should also be good for self-teaching Java through tutorials and documentation.

Continue working with whatever language the books use, and then do all your personal projects in Java if that's what you want. Repeat this for the rest of your life. Invest in TAOCP at some point.