does anyone know of a decent IRC channel for java noobs? not ##java on freenode. full of elitist pricks who would rather not help with anything. thanks!
When you're asking trivial programming questions online of various BBS'es, forums, channels, you're just showing your unwillingness to read the proper documentation and books and experiment with the implementations available, as well as possibly read their source code. It should be obvious why this behaviour is undesirable of a programmer, as a programmer will spend a lot of his time doing some of those things, and if one cannot do it, one cannot be a good programmer. From a different perspective, one can view such actions in a light similar to how an average computer user views a silly newbie who cannot understand a self-describing (supposedly) noob-proof GUI on Windows, or someone who cannot read a manpage on *nix - another kind of such type of programmer is one which is given descriptive error messages and they just CANNOT read it, until you shove the damn message in their face, or read it out loud for them, until it hits them what it says.
If you still have programming questions which do not concern those matters, and cannot be solved by reading SICP, you may ask for help.
While my words may have been a bit harsh, and I do not have problems with people asking for help on the Internet, or doing such things myself (which I rarely do, but I still do them sometimes, usually on things which will shape a possibly larger program to come, when a bad decision will cost many lines of code which will need rewritten), one should only ask questions which cannot be trivially answered by looking things up or reading a few well-known books, reading/searching the source code, or just trying things out in an implementation.