I was thinking about getting involved in developing for the mobile phone industry. I have never programmed in java before and was wondering if I need to learn java first or can I just learn J2ME by itself. My first though was that I needed to know standard java in order to build apps using J2ME. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

I'd recommend just learning the basics about the Java language, constructs, program flow, some threading etc then diving straight into J2ME.

There's a lot in J2SE (standard edition) that is not available in J2ME, notably float datatypes, and a lot of classes (graphics, AWT, etc), so why bother learning a lot of stuff that isn't available in J2ME.

Once you've looked into J2ME, the next trick is working out how to work around some of the stuff that isn't available but what you really need, e.g. using fixed point integers because you cant use floats.

[edited by - abstractworlds on October 31, 2003 10:51:05 AM]