Publisher's Synopsis
Thousands of words cannot describe a face better than a picture. This principle also applies to learning programming. When I followed several trainings, the focus was on theoretical explanations. Each lesson contained many terms and technical words. Because of my background and experience as a teacher, I wondered if that boring method was the best way to learn programming. In reality, working as a programmer is quite different than what the most traditional trainings would teach you. In fact, no one asks whether you know a particular term, but you will get hundreds of lines of code, and you must be able to deal with it. You will be asked to build new features. Sometimes you need to write Java classes or develop a program. If you are not familiar with the code, the theory can do very little for you. The most efficient way is not to bother with theories in the beginning, but spend time to work with Java code. Change the variables, statements and test the code over and over again to see what happens. This book offers many complete executable small programs (quizzes) to practice programming from the very beginning. Unfortunately, a computer doesn't explain how it comes with a specific result, and that is why this book provides a step by step explanation of the right answers to all the quizzes. This method helps beginners to focus on testing the code. When the result of executing the programs doesn't match their expectations, they start to think about solving the problem. The good news is that as soon as you start to understand the code, you can't stop working with it. Many programmers work in the evening or even in the night because it is a very creative and interesting work. This book prepares students for what is expected from them and prevents them to memorize technical terms without understanding it. I do not mean that theory is not important, but focusing on all kinds of theories from the beginning is ineffective and slow. If you start with programming, you will face many problems that require being solved. In such cases, you will also learn a lot from theories, because it supports what you practice. If you work as a programmer, you can expect a number of types of assignments. It doesn't matter what kind of companies you work. You can expect the following assignments: 1. Understanding code that has been written by other programmers. 2. Building new features for existing software. 3. Detecting bugs and fixing them in an existing program. 4. Developing new programs from scratch. For the last point, you usually need a few years' experience. Each chapter in this book begins with a brief explanation about a particular Java topic including one or more examples. Then you start to work with quizzes. 1. To choose the correct answer, you need to understand the code. That is similar to the first point of our list. If you are unable to find the right answer, you can read the step-by-step explanation of the answer. This is a very practical method to understand the process. 2. After each quiz, you will be asked to add a small piece of your own code to it to achieve a particular goal. Sometimes you will be asked to investigate different variations to study other possible results. 3. In some quizzes, you will be warned why a certain change in the code can lead to an infinite loop or a problem. 4. From the fifth chapter, you will get an assignment which requires you to write a small program regards the whole chapter. 5. Programming is solving problems, and that is the most interesting method to learn it. If you have a problem, you start to think about a solution, and that helps you to search for any information that can possibly help you to understand it. It has also been taken into account that some Java-topics are not used so often, while others you see almost in every program. On www.sarmaroof.com, you can find more information about this book and how to setup the code in Eclipse.
