Viktor Iurkov wrote:Hello everyone. I need some advice. Im learning Java through the books
Welcome to JavaRanch, Victor.
First question: What books? There are
billions.
and want to write a simple chat as my personal assignment.
Ooof. Kudos on your bravery. I'm not sure
I'd want to tackle a chat program, and I've been at this lark a
long time...
However, if you manage to do it without getting too frustrated, you'll certainly learn a lot about communications.
What can you recommend to read about networking and serialization?
Well, the
tutorials are usually a good place to start. I'm not quite sure where serialization fits into a chat program though.
The only other thing I can suggest is:
plan this project well. This is NOT a simple task you've chosen, and you're going to need to spend many hours with paper and pencil (and NO computer) before you write your
first line of Java code.
For one thing: I'd definitely write down all the rules for your "chat"
in detail, and
in English, right at the start. And keep them simple. Projects like this tend to "mushroom" because halfway through, you think of a "nice-to-have" feature that ends up adding a lot of extra code and/or logic (very often, for not much gain).
So be disciplined - the time to add "bells and whistles" is when you have a simple
working prototype,
and not before.
I suspect that you're also going to have to spend quite a while with various components like
Sockets and
URLConnections, so you're familiar with how they work, before you start connecting them all together. But if you enjoy "playing", that part may actually be quite fun.
I wish you luck. I just hope you're not taking on too much.
Winston