[dogdrool]

Much of this thread is a fairly informed yet meaningless comparison of programming languages. There's little value in making absolute value statements about particular programming languages.

Scheme sucks? It's more accurate to say that you had little luck using it in your Introduction to Computer Science course.

The OP can increase his effectiveness at work if he's able to write some software in Java. Unfortunately he doesn't know how to write software, and he also doesn't know Java. Those are two separate problems -- the first much bigger than the second.

If you're serious and committed, the best course of action is to address the problems separately. First spend some time learning to program in any language. Better yet, learn to program in several languages. There are many books that walk you through problems and show how they can be solved with computer programs. Make sure you type in (not copy and paste) every single line of code, and actually run the code.

Once you have written several programs, then you can pick up any introduction to java book to accomplish the particular task that you're doing at work.

If you don't take these two separate steps, you will likely never advance beyond a rough understanding of Java's syntax.