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RecappingTheBasics

These pages make up the course notes for my Java programming course (run at Dallam, Milnthorpe, Cumbria). Hopefully they also make a useful self-learning tutorial.

If you have worked through this tutorial to here, you have all the fundamentals of programming – you may not yet feel too confident about it but let’s just have a recap. Pretty much all programming languages have the following

• variables
• decision making – if statements
• loops – like for and do
• some way of splitting up a program into reusable chunks (Java has Classes and Methods)

So, armed with these concepts, you can write computer programs. Clearly how to put the different elements together to achieve a particular result is a matter of experience and judgement.

From here on we are going to look at more sophisticated things you can do with Java, but remember it is really all about practice and the best way to practice is to set yourself a challenge. Just trying to learn a language without an objective can be hard and it is easy to loose interest. However if you find something that you really want to make and use (may be a diary application or a website downloader) it gives you an incentive to figure out how to do it and the sense of achievement of designing and building your own application.

This work is Copyright Chris Hunter 2007, you may use it for non-commercial purposes
under the Creative Commons license Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike.