Computer Laboratory – Course material 2007

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Programming in Java

This course is taken by all Part IA students.

Lecturer: Dr A.C. Norman

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 Concurrent Systems and Applications and the Group Project) can build. It also provides specific guidance on the design and debugging of (small) programs to complement Software Design which will concentrate on issues that arise with larger bodies of code.

Lectures

Introduction. Course objectives. Historical introduction to Java and its relatives. Comparisons with ML. The sorts of programming task addressed here.
Basic use of Java. Compiling and running Java programs. The layout of a program in Java. The basic data types and operations on them. Some important libraries. More control structures. Defining new types.
Design and testing programs in Java. Understanding your objective. Decomposing a task into manageable units. Incremental development. Data structures. Program structure and information hiding. Using existing library code.
Representative Java applications. Calculation. File access. User interface. Network access.
Conclusion. Strengths and limitations of Java. A brief mention of alternatives.

Objectives

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

Recommended reading

* Eckel, B. (1998). Thinking in Java. Prentice Hall.

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