First Day of Class and Textbooks

The first day of class after going over the syllabus and introducing the java platform, we'll be playing with the Greenfoot software to create a game or simulation of sorts.  We'll be going through the Greenfoot quick intro tutorial to create an animated world where you control a crab in search of worms to eat, but watch out for lobsters that can eat you :) Okay not exactly scientifically accurate.  Here is a video walkthrough (quicktime) of the first part of the tutorial, plus the video shows other things you can do in Greenfoot.

 

Greenfoot and all the other software we will be using are free.  Go to http://www.javafx.com/ and click the orange button to get the latest Java development kit (JDK) and Netbeans integrated development environment (IDE), which will be the primary tool we will use after doing some explorations with Greenfoot.

 

I'm not requiring the purchase of a textbook, although we will be using pieces from the books Introduction to Computing & Programming with Java: A Multimedia Approach (by Guzdial & Ericson) and Simply Java Programming (by Deitel and others).  There is a PDF of the first 4 chapters of the Guzdial book available online for free, and I'll be scanning in some activities from the Simply Java Programming book.

 

Java is many things - it is a programming language, and it is a platform for running and developing software programs.  Our course focuses more on the latter - what you can do with the java platform, especially multimedia/visual applications like graphics, games, and 3D applications.

 

There is a free online java programming course that focuses more on Java the language and its syntax.  You are welcome to follow along that course concurrently with our own course.  If you want to go on to develop your own real Java software, I also recommend the book Java: How to Program (by Deitel & Deitel) as a nice reference book, or the book Head First Java if you have taken Kevin Reeve's HTML class before and liked the style of the Head First programming books.