At least your school TEACHES java (Score 1)

I go to a semi-small university in Texas (I won't name which one), and am a CS major. In the beginning of my college career, I wasn't sure I was going to even do CS in the first place, as I had no prior programming knowledge from high school except for some HTML (back when 3.0 was brand new :-) I took an introductory C programming class and really got a lot out of it, then took ASM followed by data structures, where I really figured out how to program. Unfortunately, at our school, there is a programming languages class, much the same like at other universities, where the idea was to broaden our horizons to the other various languages (such as C++ and Java, and some theoretical stuff on other languages, like Ada, Fortran, Smalltalk, etc). Amazingly, we spent ONE day on Java, and about a week on C++; we had no programming assignments for Java either. What happened was that the class had been handed off to another professor who did not stick with the way it had been taught in the past. I know of one Java programming class being offered besides the programming languages class; and there's one C++ using the STL. However, these classes are inaccessible to first and second (possibly even third) year students, as the classes are primarily for seniors and grad students. And these classes are electives only--not core classes. Be glad you get Java early. Some of us don't get to see it and have to learn it on our own :-)