Thread: C Programmer, Late Life Transition To Java

Welcome. I'm long time retired and can't talk about employment. I started learning java many years ago as a hobby after a career as an IBM mainframe assembler programmer. It took a while to get the OOP way of thinking. I took an evening course in a local college in beginning java and then have been learning on my own for years. Trying to help students has exposed me to lots of new parts of java. I've written many tools for my own usage and to learn java. I really have no idea how java is used in the real world.

That's what I'm hoping. Also I love programming. Current project is learning Android programming. The touch screen and multiple tools available on a tablet: GPS, camera, internet, etc make for a whole new environment.

As a coworker of mine says regarding recruiting: "anyone can learn the java language over a weekend, but finding someone who knows how to utilize java's more complex infrastructure is the hard part."
Some of the more annoying and complex infrastructure in java can be difficult to learn, but are widely used in the business community, which is probably why the salaries are still pretty high. Due to java's shift towards a server-side language over the past few years, learning about things like the Spring Framework (Spring Framework - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) can be very important.
From what I've found, there are really two primary paths you can take as a java developer right now (as far as making yourself marketable to businesses):
1. Android development. Norm mentioned this above. Getting good at this can make you worth a lot of money.
2. Web-based server-side development. This is not to be confused with Java Applets, which are web-based client-side applications. Applets, from a typical business perspective, are pretty much extinct. Client-side applications are normally written in javascript, HTML5, ect. these days, but utilize a java server-side system. For these server-side systems, the typical java business environment will probably see the use of the Spring Framework, Maven (a build tool which is used as a replacement for ANT), Tomcat and JBoss servers, JUnit and JMeter (for unit testing), and a lot of other stuff. These are things to be familiar with if you want to go down this employment path.