Ok, so I went to uni, and in uni they are big about plagiarism. Not big in the sense they promote it, but big in that if you do it, you may as well consider yourself chemically castrated with no hope for a career in <chosen field> or especially academia ever again.
Uni made me wary of copying work. It frustrated me to see other students copy assignments the night before something was due. If you weren’t working something out yourself, you were missing out on the richness of the experience of, well, learning what the assignment was supposed to teach you.
All this, work it out yourself, got turned on its head when I entered the professional programmer world. Mentors advised to read as many code samples as possible, it will help you learn. And whilst code samples aren’t necessarily cheating, and using this code in your own work provided you cite it and the license permits, should also be ok, it took a long time to get away from the stigma obtained during my time at uni…. which really when you think about people who further their academic careers by way of research papers that require you to reference other peoples work, is a really dumb stigma to get across. I put it down to the plagiarism fear engulfing what should be best practice in normal circumstances.
So with that guilt trip swept away, there was a great blog: Top 5 Websites for Java Application Examples which referenced Java2s, Java DB, and Java Galaxy. All sites that have come up in my Google searches before when I’ve lapsed my memory and forgotten the trivial convert something to a byte array or whatever other simplistic, seldom used, grassroots technique.
Whilst you cant be taught on these alone, the fact that they support you when you are the most stressed and your memory works its least efficient means I have no problem in recommending these sites 🙂