[mike240se]

ok i am no great developr, but i have written some cool utilities in vb.net using visual studio. nothing great, the last app i wrote opened up a dns log produced by a server and then used reg expressions to find specific things the user would need to look for, etc. nothing huge but it was some what complex. so i am not a complete newb, but close to it.

so when i got a bb, i was interested in writing some apps for it, small stuff. i wrote some for my winmo device using .net and it was mega easy.

but i got the eclipse ide, and installed the bb plugins, etc. and opened up the hello world sample and am so clueless, i feel like i never even took a course in programming.

its the first time in my life where i can understand the helloworld program at all.

now i dont know if this is because i dont know java, dont know specifically j2me or cause i dont know the bb api's, etc but i gave up more than a couple times.

so i need some guidance. i cant find a single book for programming for the blackberry. do i need a intro book on java? an intro book on j2me?

or perhaps i need an intro book on java and then a book on j2me? or can i start with just j2me without knowing any java?

and then how do i learn the bb ide without any books? the bb developer zone is garbage for what i want to learn. i dont need to learn how to do advanced bluetooth stack blah blah. i need to a book that starts by explaining this hello world sample to me, etc. and i havent found that, not even on amazon.

anyone in my shoes gone through this?

[smaug]

You're going to want to start by learning Java.

[Zav]

I went through the same thing to start but was able to figure it out eventually. Java is very different on first glance than C or anything else I've programmed in. Essentially it is extremely object oriented. Besides this the syntax just needs to be learned to make sense of even the "Hello World" example. Definitely start with the Java tutorials at Sun: java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/. Then I suggest downloading the JDE and going through the example applications, there are a ton of them. In the end I found that Java is pretty fun to program in once you get used to using objects and classes and all that. Basic stuff can be done the same as in C, you just have to learn the different syntax (where it is different). Then for developing the blackberry you just have to get really familiar with the API. Trial and error with the simulator and lots of web searches worked for me.