Java Developer learning ABAP

Why ABAP?
For the past couple of years, I’ve been working on the Portal Development, first on the implementation project, then developing some JSps. Later I found myself trying to understand Business Server Pages (BSP) development done in the Portal in order to support some HR applications. BSPs are similar to Sun Microsystems’ Java Server Pages (JSP) or Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP), except instead of Java or VBScript, they use ABAP, mixed with HTML. HTMLB libraries work very nicely within BSPs.
So in a roundabout way, I found myself trying to decipher ABAP code, which looks like gibberish if you’re not used to it. I had programmed a little bit in COBOL in my third year at engineering and ABAP looked a lot like it. After many hours of pretending to understand it, I decided to actually start learning ABAP properly. Although, I’m still very much a beginner, I can happily report that ABAP doesn’t look too bad anymore.
I present to you my first ABAP program that pulls up data from an SAP table – I know the code below is trivial, but for a beginner, its pretty awesome – only a month ago, I couldn’t have written this.

My First ABAP Example Program:

Some text will come here

Some resources:

• ABAP Development on SDN
• ABAP on SAP Help Knowledgebase

Courses to take:
These should get a beginner started with ABAP development:
Look at course descriptions and details on booking information for these
courses at the SAP Education web site.
• BC400 ABAP Workbench Concepts and Tools
• BC401 ABAP Objects
• BC402 Advanced ABAP
• BC405 Programming ABAP Reports
• BC410 Developing User Dialogs

Books to buy:

Start with one of the following:
• The Official ABAP Reference or
• The ABAP Quick Reference

Summary

ABAP is an easy to learn to language. I’m probably going at it backwards: trying to learn ABAP after having programmed in Java, when most people in the SAP world seem to be ABAPers trying to learn Java.