Understand the philosophy behind the language

When I was first learning the earliest versions of Java, the language seemed verbose and unnecessarily complex. I was an inexperienced programmer at the time and was used to a procedural world coded in C. Java was the furthest thing from procedural but I could not appreciate its genius– or even it’s utility– because I didn’t understand the Object Oriented Philosophy behind it.Then came Dr. Weng Kai. In Dr. Kai's class at the University of Zhejiang in China, I first started to understand the Object Oriented Approach to solving computer science programs.Learning the Object Oriented Philosophy really helped me appreciate and understand Java at its core as an Object Oriented Approach. There is a reason we have a plethora of programming languages. Different languages are optimized to solve different types of problems or designed to work at different levels of abstraction within a computer system.  Understanding what the language you are learning is used for– and at what level of the “food chain” it works best at– is critical to understanding how to apply that language to solving actual problems.