- Taught by a Stanford-educated, ex-Googler, husband-wife team
- This course will use Java and an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Never fear, we have a detailed video on how to get this downloaded and set up.
- Hundreds of lines of source code, and hundreds of lines of comments - just download and open in your IDE!
A Java course for everyone - accessible yet serious, to take you from absolute beginner to an early intermediate level
Let’s parse that.
- This is a Java course for everyone. Whether you are a complete beginner (a liberal arts major, an accountant, doctor, lawyer) or an engineer with some programming experience but looking to learn Java - this course is right for you.
- The course is accessible because it assumes absolutely no programming knowledge, and quickly builds up using first principles alone
- Even so, this is a serious Java programming class - the gradient is quite steep, and you will go from absolute beginner to an early intermediate level
- The course is also quirky. The examples are irreverent. Lots of little touches: repetition, zooming out so we remember the big picture, active learning with plenty of quizzes. There’s also a peppy soundtrack, and art - all shown by studies to improve cognition and recall.
What's Covered:
- Programming Basics: What programming is, and a carefully thought-through tour of the basics of any programming. Installing and setting up an IDE and writing your first program
- The Object-Oriented Paradigm: Classes, Objects, Interfaces, Inheritance; how an OO mindset differs from a functional or imperative programming mindset; the mechanics of OO - access modifiers, dynamic dispatch, abstract base classes v interfaces. The underlying principles of OO: encapsulation, abstraction, polymorphism
- Threading and Concurrency: A deep and thorough study of both old and new ways of doing threading in Java: Runnables, Callables, Threads, processes, Futures, Executors.
- Reflection, Annotations: The how, what and why - also the good and bad
- Lambda Functions: Functional constructs that have made the crossover into the mainstream of Java - lambda functions, aggregate operators.
- Modern Java constructs: Interface default methods; properties and bindings too. Also detailed coverage of Futures and Callables, as well as of Lambda functions, aggregation operators. JavaFX as contrasted with Swing.
- Packages and Jars: The plumbing is important to understand too.
- Language Features: Serialisation; why the Cloneable interface sucks; exception handling; the immutability of Strings; the Object base class; primitive and object reference types; pass-by-value and pass-by-object-reference.
- Design: The MVC Paradigm, Observer and Command Design Patterns.
- Swing: Framework basics; JFrames, JPanels and JComponents; Menus and menu handling; Trees and their nuances; File choosers, buttons, browser controls. A very brief introduction to JavaFX.
Programming Drills (code-alongs, with source code included)
- Serious stuff:
- A daily stock quote summariser: scrapes the internet, does some calculations, and outputs a nice, formatted Excel spreadsheet.
- A News Curation app to summarise newspaper articles into a concise email snippet using serious Swing programming
- Simple stuff:
- Support with choosing a programming environment; downloading and setting up IntelliJ.
- Simple hello-world style programs in functional, imperative and object-oriented paradigms.
- Maps, lists, arrays. Creating, instantiating and using objects, interfaces
Talk to us!
- Mail us about anything - anything! - and we will always reply :-)
