As the title clearly states, I am stuck - in Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS. Currently, my lecturers in the Computer and Information Sciences Department have decided to select the best students in my Object-Oriented Programming class to learn the real-world application of Java, a flexible and powerful programming language that is in use worldwide for a variety of uses.

I'm quite grateful about being selected, particularly since I'm a person who's very much interested in Java (once one is good at it, one naturally aims higher). For the better part of this past semester, people have been struggling to get by in the subject because of the difference between object-oriented and structured programming (which we learned beforehand in the January semester of this year).

Assignment submission datelines always became a frenetic race against time as people attempted to develop - or copy - a working solution to the given problems at hand, oftentimes going without sleep for nights in a futile effort to set up a running program that fulfills the assignment marking criteria.

I suppose the whole problem started when our first assignment was to build a simple (simple being a relative term) working calculator using Java. At that point we had no idea what the code was like (other than being inherited for C, which we learned previously), what functions to use, the basic concepts of Java - in short, we didn't know anything substantial at all!

From that point on, working on Java became nothing more than a headache for the majority of us, what with all of us struggling to keep afloat. I learned the best way to get familiar with Java was to tinker around and read up the many resources available on the Internet, especially the official tutorials and "dictionary" that provided examples on how to use certain keywords.

So now, my efforts have paid off. I mean, being selected to learn Java for what it is, instead of the simple (again, relativity is important) programs that we've had to create before, during the semester. My room mate is around to keep me company (he was selected, too), but our only complaint is that the campus this time around is too quiet. Just about everyone else has gone home for the holidays, and most of the cafes are closed as well, thereby limiting our choice of food for meals.

Since nowadays I expect to have nothing much to do (or, heaven forbid, nothing to do!), I will post soon about the past half-a-week that has been my holidays thus far. Toodles!