At 10:41 08/03/99 +0100, RAY, Nick wrote:

Dear Chemwebbers,

I'm starting to (try and) teach myself the basics of Java programming with a view to seeing to what applications we can put it towards within our team. As a practising organic chemist with an interest in IT (and not the other way around), can anyone advise/direct me on suitable resources to get started? Or, to put it another way, how did you all learn? As this may be elementary for most of you, please reply privately to the address below,

Thanks, Nick Ray ***************************************** Nick Ray, PhD, Leading Chemist - Lead Generation Rhone-Poulenc Agriculture nick.ray@ongar.rhone-poulenc.com ******************************************

Hi Ray I used to teach Java before entering the real world. There is one serious question to ask before you learn Java: "Do you understand Object Oriented Programming?" If you do then Learning Java will be very quick and easy, if you don't then you will have to learn OO as well as Java which is harder. Do not try to ignore OO as Java really doesn't work very well in functional mode and even printing to the screen uses OO. Books that I used: Java in a Nutshell (Really good if you know C/C++) WROX press Java Books (I use the "Fundamentals" one which is aimed at advanced users, but some of my students told me that the "Basics" book was good. Other people are bound to come up with the current standard books so I'll leave it at this. One final word, if you are using Java for chemistry then also look at our Java Beans product "ChemSymphony" which includes about 35 beans with a lot of standard functionality which can be used either as beans in an IDE or directly as a Java class library. This toolkit will save you a huge amount of time and the cost is extremely low (actually we think that it might actually be so low that it is putting people off!). Cheers Lewis --- --- Dr. Lewis Jardine | e-mail: lewis@cherwell.com ChemSymphony Team Leader | Phone: +44 (0)1865 784810 Cherwell Scientific Publishing | Fax: +44 (0)1865 784801 Oxford Science Park | http://www.cherwell.com/ OX4 4GA, UK | http://www.chemsymphony.com/ --- --- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)