Programming in Java

Lecturer: Dr A.F. Blackwell

No. of lectures: 16

This course is a prerequisite for Concurrent Systems and Applications, Group Project.

Aims

This course is provided to ensure that all students have exposure to a common imperative programming language. It will give them experience with the fundamentals of object-oriented programming, and provide a foundation upon which various Part IB courses (especially the Group Project) can build. It also provides specific guidance on the design and debugging of (small) programs to complement Software Engineering which will concentrate on issues that arise with larger bodies of code.

Lectures

• Fundamentals. Concepts and teaching environment.

• Objects. Classes, methods, instances and state.

• Class definitions. Fields, constructors and parameters.

• Object interaction. Abstraction and modularisation, method calls.

• Grouping objects. Collections, loops, iterators and arrays.

• Java libraries. Packages, libraries, interfaces and documentation.

• Quality assurance. Testing, debugging, test automation and writing for maintainability.

• Designing classes. Responsibility-driven design, coupling, cohesion and refactoring.

• Inheritance. Inheritance, subtyping, substitution and polymorphic variables.

• Polymorphism. Method polymorphism, static and dynamic type, overriding, dynamic method lookup and protected access.

• Flexible class structures. Abstract classes, interfaces, multiple inheritance.

• Handling errors. Defensive programming, anticipating that things could go wrong, exception handling and throwing, error reporting, file processing.

• Application development. Case study, discovering classes, CRC cards, designing interfaces and patterns.

Objectives

At the end of the course students will be able to write Java code both in the form of applications and applets. They should have an overview of all features of the language and of major parts of its associated libraries.

Recommended book

*Barnes, D.J. & Kölling, M. (2003). Objects first with Java: A practical introduction using BlueJ. Pearson Education.