I've noticed that many new developers (and some not so new) have a tendency to choose the road of be the solitary programmer; hard coding everything. Libraries are extremely useful and are made to be used and improved upon, so if you have a problem, look around for library that suits your problem.Though I do know the feeling of just wanting to write a ridiculously large library even when there are several libraries that suit perfectly well and the feeling of accomplishment when finishing.

Since most programmer use IDEs it's very easy to add libraries to you project. In NetBeans it's this:


In Eclipse it's this:

(In the "Properites" of you project)

Some Java libraries that I can recommend are (sorry, I'm a Java programmer):
Pretty much all the Apaches which covers from XML-RPC to project building: http://www.apache.org/
The JEdit Syntax Package, always good for any text editor: http://syntax.jedit.org/
Java Plugin Framework (JPF): http://jpf.sourceforge.net/

I personally love looking and exploring through packages and learning from them on how the creators solved problems. I still have tremendous fun doing it and I hope never stop.

Thanks for reading,
Paul Kenny