I took a rather strange way to learn programming:
- I started by C, when I 10 years old, I didn't understand anything and produced uggly spaghetti code
- then I learn z80 assembly and produced some pretty efficient code but I was fed up with hardware and..
- I came back to C++
code snippets and O'Reilly books helped me a lot

Java is fast??? What kind of mental derangement do you suffer from?