Reading and Software

If you consider yourself a beginning programmer, please buy the textbook Java: How to Program, by Deitel & Deitel, pub. Prentice Hall 1997. This book was written explicitly for a first-year programming course. I hope to get through chaps. 1-8, 17, and ideally 9 and 10, by the end of the semester. This is 450-550 pages, or about 15-18 pages per day.

On the other hand, if you consider yourself a reasonably experienced programmer, I recommend the textbook Core Java, by Cornell & Horstmann, part of the Sunsoft Press Java Series; the second edition came out in April, 1997. I hope to get through chaps. 1-10, and ideally 11-13, by the end of the semester. This is 450-600 pages, or about 15-20 pages per day.

In either case, I'm asking you to do a lot of reading. Please keep up with the reading. Don't just come to class and take notes, because the authors of these textbooks know more about Java than I do. I want to spend my time in class explaining what's in the texts, adding my own perspectives, filling in things omitted from the texts, and helping people with their programs; I do not want to spend my time reading the texts to you.

I maintain a Web page for the class at http://www.adelphi.edu/~sbloch/class/390/. The Web page will contain a copy of this syllabus, a (hopefully up-to-date) schedule of what programming and reading assignments are due when, and links to other relevant pages such as my ``Adages on Software Design and Development'', which I recommend that you all read in bits and pieces as time allows.

This semester we'll do most of our programming on the HP Vectra computers in room B33. Computing Center staff have recently upgraded these machines to Windows/NT and installed Netscape, Internet Explorer, and Symantec's Café, which is an integrated Java compiler, interpreter, editor, debugger, class browser, and I don't know what else. It looks quite powerful and friendly to me, although the ``tutorial'' on the help menu seems to have been written for an earlier version of Café.