Head First Java, 2nd Edition

Head First Design Patterns

Beginners Guide

Objects First With Java : A Practical Introduction Using BlueJ (3rd Edition)

Format: Paperback
Author: David J. Barnes
ReleaseDate: 05 June, 2006
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Rating:

I am not an idiot
I am not an idiot and appreciate the fact that this book is by a real life teacher who is aware of the failings of beginners and helps to put these right. I am a beginner at JAVA and I have tried other books and spent a lot of time making poor progress as they try to talk down to you. Combine this with an online discussion group for problems and you have an excellent learning environment.

The Holy Grail for Beginners learning Java 5++


This book stands miles above all Beginner java book's on the market today. Had my first taste of BlueJ as a college student at Bell College Hamilton, my Java skills have increased tremendously mainly due to the principles and concepts learned from BlueJ. The book comes with its own IDE "BlueJ". The book focuses early on Classes, Objects and clearly explains the concepts with little regard to code. The book then invites the reader to open up example projects with the BlueJ IDE and gets the user to create objects from the classes then examine the methods, again paying little attention to coding (There is plenty of coding and exercises in this book, but kept to minimum at this stage as it's vital to understand the concepts related with classes and objects and methods). This then enables the user to better visualize abstract concepts and object behavior.

The book uses an iterative approach and user finds that principles taught in the book are used throughout the book. The book teaches you to code practical programs such as a Database to contain CD and Video objects; most importantly it stimulates your mind and imagination. This enables the user to find other ways to apply the concepts to other problems. The book gets you to into the habit of thinking of items as objects. Plain and simple BlueJ gives you the right amount of Java knowledge without going into unnecessary details and allows the user to see the big picture and enable them to successfully start understanding more advanced Java material.

When I got to university the Students who used BlueJ at college were miles ahead in understanding Java language than those who had not. Most students who did not use BlueJ before university had a habit of writing procedural style programs with the Java
language.

Recommended !
.

A good book, especially when combined with BlueJ
The authors of "Objects First" are trying to make their book "interesting" for this new kind of student by adding a lot of application "projects" such as: little games, cinema ticket booking systems etc. The book seems to be written for a "new breed" of students in times of Mass-Education, that is: students who want to learn programming vocationally rather than scientifically; students who want to apply programming to "real-world" jobs rather than to study a programming language for the sake of its own beauty. This might feel somewhat strange (or even odd) to those people who come from a classical scientific-academic background where concepts were mainly studied for their own sake, but I think it is right that this new kind of vocational students are provided with a good book that suits their practical needs. Indeed, the "Objects First" approach is good, and it is only a very logical consequence of the "Problem Oriented" approach according to which progressive professors were confronting beginner students with Functional programming languages like Scheme or Miranda (instead of procedural Pascal or C) since the mid-1980s. What I appreciate most at "Objects First" is: this book comes with a CD that contains the really VERY useful BlueJ software development environment! The text and style of the book itself is, in my opinion, rather tiring and tedious, too packed and cluttered with "projects", too repetitive, too self-interrupting with all sorts of "windows" and "boxes" etc. The same contents could have been presented in a much leaner, much more concise and much less repetitive fashion. (At this point I seem to disagree with the book authors' opinion on how teaching should be actually done. ) Also the book's language is, in my opinion, somewhat too coloquial and not "academic" enough (for example: too often they use the sloppy un-word "thing" instead of finding a more rigorous way of expressing what they want to say). On the other hand I must acknowledge that the "spoon-feeding" approach of this book (which I personally find somewhat too patronizing at times) really allows me to do my own teaching in the way I want to do it -usually I start with the concept of Class (thereby explicitly referring to classical Aristotelian Philosophy) before introducing the concept of Objects systematically as a generalisation of Data Structures (like, e. g. , "Stack") which are wellknown since ever- and then I can leave the students alone to study this book on their own, in addition to what I have presented in my lecture. Indeed I must say that most of my students have bought or borrowed this book, and they seem to use it quite happily. As long as they are happy, I have no reason to complain, and this is exactly what the autors have predicted in their preface: students seem to like the book more than their teachers do. Another important aspect of this book is rarely mentioned by other reviews which I have read so far, namely the teaching of programming from a Software Engineering perspective, with a strong focus on software structure, software clarity, and semi-automated software testing. This is a very important aspect of programming, unfortunately often forgotten by other programming books (though, of course, a book on programming can never fully replace a book on software engineering). In fact I am using the BlueJ book's chapters on Testing (supported and semi-automated by BlueJ's "JUnit" test concept) and Design also in Software Engineering classes where the focus of the lecture is clearly NOT programming. I stronlgly support the book's idea of teaching programming from a Software Engineering perspective (rather than from the machine perspective), though on the other hand I can see that the mingling of Programming Concepts and Software Engineering Concepts can be somewhat challenging (if not overwhelming) for some of the slower and weaker students. [By the way: sorry for my clumsy English, it's not my mother language. ].