Yet again, another change of focus. I've had a go at C++, was already familiar with various dialects of basic and now I'm looking at Java from the ground up. That is, starting with the console side of things. I still want to learn a cross platform GUI system and I reckon Java is the way to go.

Even though I spent many months studying C++ (at the console level) that time has not been wasted. Programming techniques or how problems are solved do not change between programming languages it's only the syntax that changes. In the case of Java there is very little syntax change and therefore I'm finding the transition relatively easy.