In a mere couple days, I will be relocating once more. It won't be the last time, however it will at least be to the vicinity of where I fully expect to settle in. I'll finally live near my kids again, and I will be near the school I will be attending. When that finally happens, I can at long last achieve the final few tasks I need to in order to enroll in classes and begin learning programming in a properly structured manner. I know my posts hear have been dominantly negative about my experience, but I really do have some very positive feelings about what I have learned in general. I would just like to very briefly rehash a couple of those things.
First of all, to some of the YouTubers I've mentioned that taught me a great amount, I'm incredibly grateful. To Oracle themselves for their tutorial systems, I am grateful, but also agitated with to a point, due to what I feel is a slightly out-of-order chain of lessons. For instance teaching the syntax of anonymous classes and lambda expressions before getting to some more basic core things a programmer should know like some of Strings methods and such. It created some great confusion to me at that time trying to follow their examples of what these were pointing to and accomplishing when I didn't even understand what the actual expressions within these classes and referenced methods were accomplishing. It just made it harder to really follow the chain of events, and thus the potential uses of it all. However, the lessons on these things ARE there, and often even cross-referenced so it wasn't very difficult to bounce around a little bit as I felt the need. So, again, I'm very thankful I have Oracle as a resource that's so readily available.
At the end of the day, as with all things internet, there is a lot of sifting through "trash" in order for anyone who wants to find valuable information, but those are ultimately the only resources I would vouch for personally. I would probably start with some basic YouTube videos then just dive into Oracle's tutorial. That was ultimately what helped me the most to avoid my previously mentioned issue of being presented with material I couldn't even properly experiment with on my own to further understand it. These basic video tutorials gave me some ideas I could play with and simple ways of performing tasks, so I could then attempt to do similar tasks in slightly different ways just to play with new things.
For a field in which I think I've forgotten more than I've learned after all the times I either turned away from it or was pulled away from it (the former in my earlier years and the latter in more recent times), I would just say above all else the only thing more valuable than knowing where to turn is having the will to keep at it. Rather than being overly frustrated with myself for ever having stopped all that time ago, I'm kinda grateful for first-hand knowledge of what a pain it is to come back way later and have to start from scratch again when, somewhere inside, I certainly wanted to dive in and just start hard and fast. Not wanting to relive this experience again is a tremendous motivation for me now. Plus, frankly, to regret going the route I chose would essentially equate to regretting all the other valuable experiences and lessons I've had through things like my time in the military, or my time as an electrician, or factory worker, or... well you name it. I bounced around thinking I'd find that great job I needed to provide for my family the way I wanted to, and now I know one thing for sure. For the past eight years, I learned a little bit about a great many things, but that's not really any use when it comes to making progress on a career level (duh, right?) This time of my life is thankfully very well set now for me to really bite down and focus on just doing one thing. The one thing that I was better at in my school days than any other thing. The one thing that after all this time, I've never completely stopped wanting to do.
So, here's to trading my current frustrations over trying to learn today to all of the frustrations faced in the life of an actual, professional programmer tomorrow (which I strangely suspect will often be less about actually "how do I write this complex bit of code?" and more about the political games involved in, oh, every job I've had ever).
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