Beginner Java Project Advice
<p>Dear stackoverflow community,</p>

<p>I've never coded in Java before and I find that having an actual project sharpens the learning process.</p>

<p>So, I'm looking for some 'paint by number' code Java projects that are:</p>

<ul>
<li>for beginners</li>
<li>online, and</li>
<li>free.</li>
</ul>

<p>It needs to be like Lego... for example there is a picture of what you will be creating, a description of the components, and step by step illustrated instructions how to complete the project.  And yes I've used Google, searched stackoverflow and even looked for cookbooks on Amazon but I can't seem to find what I'm after.</p>

<p>To put this question into context I am a beginner programmer who has done a little tinkering but wants to become much much better.  I started learning computer programming in Perl on Ubuntu but found it got too hard to quickly (bug finding difficult and very difficult to program web scraping) and I didn't find much help from the online Perl community to move my project forward (Perlmonks for example unless I paid someone to do when I wanted to learn how to do it myself).  My Perl code project was then abandoned and I didn't consider doing it in another language.  A year later I picked up AutoIt to overcome painful and repetitive IE tasks at work.  I got pretty far with AutoIt and found the community to be amazing and ready to help.  I ended up making a few different programs that I use every day at work.  I tried to extend to ever more complicated web-scraping and automation in AutoIt but found it broke with the release of IE9 and was extremely hard to program for when met with websites that used Javascript extensively.  I looked at learning C# as a way of overcoming these limitations in AutoIt but found that I couldn't just jump into C# program IE automation tasks easily.  I was really inspired by a <a href="http://datascience101.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/the-first-ever-data-scientist/" rel="nofollow">video about being a data scientist</a> and I'm now trying to learn Java with the view of completing the <a href="http://www.coursera.org" rel="nofollow">free algorithms and machine learning courses online</a> and finally getting to grips with OOP.  I've tried starting these courses but find that an in-depth knowledge of Java is required.  I've made a start with a free Java course that covers the basics but find it hard to learn without a project to think about when learning the material.</p>
