So I've had a good bit of trouble learning build tools for programming lately. Like, a lot of trouble. Maven's been giving me a tough time with its strict directory structure and it took me quite a while to figure out why the nested folders went so deep. Seems a bit unnecessary to me compared to NPM's directory structure, which is far less redundant.

In addition, just yesterday I had trouble understanding how to add JUnit as a dependency to an existing project (a calculator app I've been coding for the past few weeks). I opened quite a few tutorials trying to figure out why the class I created wasn't running with VSCode's Java testing extension, only to find out later many of them were outdated.

I did figure out the problem this morning, and I finally got my code to run, but I'm curious if anyone else has had similar experience learning build tools. I'm definitely a newbie when it comes to software development, and I'm just coding some independent projects to gain experience.…