3 Mistakes Beginners Make When First Learning Java and Android Development

Key Takeaways

[Music] hey guys this is Ben from Java programming for beginners. comom and today I'm going to talk about the three mistakes coders make when they first started are three mistakes beginners make and I made myself when I first started to learn how to code just a quick background on me if you've never watched any of my videos I did not know anything about coding I searched everywhere I tried you I tried YouTube videos I tried everything I tried books I'm a slow reader so I didn't like that um to learn how to code cuz I had an idea I was passionate about and I wanted to make um So eventually I found a program called team treehouses are an online code school they teach a wide range of courses they have thousands of videos um I learned Java in a month Android 2 months after that so 3 months um in total to make my first Android app the app I really wanted to make um it was a really enriching experience I learned a lot and I continue to study Java to this day that's why I started this website to help beginners who want to learn how to code but but are unsure of whether they should do it so today I'm going to talk about three mistakes I made as a beginner starting out coding of course this is a extremely um narrow um three mistakes I'm about to give there's thou there there's hundreds of not thousands there's hundreds of mistakes beginners probably make and hundreds of mistakes I made first learning how to code because it was very difficult um there's so much to learn in coding you can't learn it all in the beginning and you will make mistakes inevitably but anyway my first mistake or first mistake you might make learning to code is ignoring libraries basically libraries and coding is it's basically like a collection of code that solves a problem in a concise way and it's it's ready to use just like you pick up a book and has a solution to your problem a library is a collection of code collection of um programs to allow you to solve a problem so when you're coding and you need to solve a problem maybe parsing an image maybe formatting an image and there's already a library for that there's no reason to solve a problem that's already been solved and tested by thousands of people uh the thing about most libraries that is that they're open source people can openly manipulate them and redistribute the software for the benefit of um International coding community so you really want to take advantage of libraries learn what they are um Team Treehouse talks about libraries they gave a great in-depth tutorial in the Java Basics course about libraries um at the time when I learned they didn't have it but they do have it now but anyway libraries very important you need to use them to make your programs more efficient and it makes you an overall better coder because you learn how to use other people's code and it allows you it actually augment your code in a sense because you learn how to cooperate with other people's programs and stuff like that so for my second point is a mistake you I made was I didn't use cheap and free resources in the beginning when I could have um I don't recommend going only free sources but I do recommend watching the occasional YouTube video um because not every online course that you pay for is going to cover everything about coding team Tre house is amazing but it's not going to cover everything okay they'll cover like 95% of the stuff but like the minor topics you go on forums go on stack Overflow learn about the smaller details the minutia of the language you're learning um which is really beneficial but I still recommend treeh house excellent for beginners excellent for intermediate coders experts at the point you're an intermediate coder you'll be able to direct your learning you won't even need a place to learn you'll just learn yourself but beginners and intermediates team Treehouse is awesome but still take advantage of free resources take advantage of library books whatever you can find to learn to augment your overall understanding of the coding language you're learning and number three um this is kind of like esoteric this is not exactly something you think of off the top of your head as a mistake coders commonly make but memory leaks basically when you have a program when you have an application that needs to run on Hardware um the software or program has to say hey I need this amount of memory give it to me um this is mine now and I'm going to use it so basically you're allocating memory to the program and the program says hey this memories mine and if your program doesn't handle the me when your program um stops running if it doesn't say okay I'm done with it then that's a memory leak because it's going to hold on to that memory that's and it's not using it it's going to keep holding on to it and that's a waste of memory it can cause your application to lag it can cause your phone to crash many of my first Android apps um I didn't handle memory correctly I create extra resources you'll see what I mean when you start learning to code I created extra resources that my my program didn't need I didn't release the resources and they continued to run in the background and I eventually crashed my phone and I couldn't even get it to turn on and it was crazy that probably won't happen to you because I made a really intensive application like intensive on the um operating system but you want to really understand the lower level processes that happen you need to understand threads this is covered very well in treehouse when I um screwed up my um my phone with that application I skipped the lesson on threading uh you need to understand threads you need to understand um how memory is allocated Java is actually Java actually does memory handling very well it does it automatically for you but there's still a chance the occasional memory leak can happen and in Android it did happen to me with an application that um I made that was really intensive on the phone but uh memory leaks are very important to understand this is something that um it's not critical in the beginning later on these smaller details are critical to the overall user experience of the app but anyway those are the top three things I had um for you about the biggest mistakes beginners make when they first learn to program um I really wanted to make this list detailed and really minute not like those very broad posts that don't really help you I want to make make it very like experiential like these like memory leaks that's something you wouldn't think of normally but that's only something you can learn from actually doing coding and messing up and these things happening to you and that's really what I want to do with this website Java programming for beginners anyway if you like this video hit the Thumbs Up Button if you um want to see more videos like this subscribe I'm going to link my website right here if you've never coded before if you're a beginner who wants to learn how to code if you want to learn a new coding language you already know one click this link I give a a review of Team Treehouse I talk about how awesome they are they have thousands of videos great staff great teachers um they give you a 7-Day free trial no risk no credit card I believe I yeah I don't I don't think you're putting your credit card at first people are normally scared of that I I used to be scared of that I don't really care now but um you just enter your name email whatever and you just sign up 7 days free you get everything free um actually before you even do that if you're scared to even put your name and email in I give you a tour of the paid members area right here on my website you can click below a free tour I show you everything they give you I show you all the videos I show you the dashboard the layout everything they give you I show you it so if you're afraid to hop in just check out my site look at the video um titled 2017 tour of the Java and Android courses I actually show all the courses I just titled the video that anyway thank you so much for watching subscribe like this video check out my website right here link description thank you so much for watching see you