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Goals
Like my previous book Thinking in C++, this book has come to be structured around the process of teaching the language. In particular, my motivation is to create something that provides me with a way to teach the language in my own seminars. When I think of a chapter in the book, I think in terms of what makes a good lesson during a seminar. My goal is to get bite-sized pieces that can be taught in a reasonable amount of time, followed by exercises that are feasible to accomplish in a classroom situation.
My goals in this book are to:
- Present the material one simple step at a time so that you can easily digest
each concept before moving on.
- Use examples that are as simple and short as possible. This sometimes
prevents me from tackling “real world” problems, but I’ve
found that beginners are usually happier when they can understand every detail
of an example rather than being impressed by the scope of the problem it solves.
Also, there’s a severe limit to the amount of code that can be absorbed in
a classroom situation. For this I will no doubt receive criticism for using
“toy examples,” but I’m willing to accept that in favor of
producing something pedagogically useful.
- Carefully sequence the presentation of features so that you’re exposed
to a topic before you see it in use. Of course, this isn’t always
possible; in those situations, a brief introductory description is given.
- Give you what I think is important for you to understand about the language,
rather than everything I know. I believe there is an information importance
hierarchy, and that there are some facts that 95 percent of programmers will
never need to know—details that just confuse people and increase their
perception of the complexity of the language. To take an example from C, if you
memorize the operator precedence table (I never did), you can write clever code.
But if you need to think about it, it will also confuse the reader/maintainer of
that code. So forget about precedence, and use parentheses when things
aren’t clear.
- Keep each section focused enough so that the lecture time—and the time
between exercise periods—is small. Not only does this keep the
audience’s minds more active and involved during a hands-on seminar, but
it gives the reader a greater sense of accomplishment.
- Provide you with a solid foundation so that you can understand the issues
well enough to move on to more difficult coursework and books.
JDK HTML documentation
The Java language and libraries from Sun Microsystems (a free download from java.sun.com) come with documentation in electronic form, readable using a Web browser, and virtually every third-party implementation of Java has this or an equivalent documentation system. Almost all the books published on Java have duplicated this documentation. So you either already have it or you can download it, and unless necessary, this book will not repeat that documentation, because it’s usually much faster if you find the class descriptions with your Web browser than if you look them up in a book (and the on-line documentation is probably more up-to-date). You’ll simply be referred to “the JDK documentation.” This book will provide extra descriptions of the classes only when it’s necessary to supplement that documentation so you can understand a particular example.
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