Slashdot Mirror
Seeking a Solid Java Textbook?
StudMuffin asks: "I am teaching a Master's level Introductory Java Programming class, at the University of Michigan in January, and am on the hunt for a solid Java textbook. This class is aimed at grad students (who obviously have a bachelors degree, so they are assumed to be able to think on their own) with no programming experience. Specifically, I would like to ground them in good Object Oriented principles, solid program design techniques, and finally in the actual syntax of Java. I would rather think of this as a 'How to program well' class that happens to use Java as the language over a 'Java class' that happens to cover programming. I would like to stay away from the applet heavy books that I tend to find, focusing instead on the topics above. Any ideas?"
I never thought I'd hear the phrase "Master's level Introductory."
"Come on, let's go drink till we can't feel feelings anymore."
and while I cannot single out a textbook for you, I urge you to spend 3 classes on UML. Understanding an object and it's methods really helped me, the language was secondary to that; hell, I just used the API ;).
Check out Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java. Not really a textbook in the classic sense, but sounds like what you need. Also available in an HTML version.
People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.
I have a professor that is in the process of writing his own book for introduction to programming class. I didn't think that it was terribly enlightening, and focused on some GUI toys early on, but he appears to have remodelled the book some, perhaps in response to these sorts of complaints. We used it in our class for a couple of years, but it appears that they've moved on. Some of the other students really enjoyed it though, and it makes a handy reference.
What I do like about the book is that the book doesn't focus on the java libraries. No fussing about the difference between a HashMap and HashSet, or what Runnable means.
Since we're not using it right now, you'd probably be an easy sell as a royalty free test market. Shoot off an email to him if you think the book is workable.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I always wished I would come across an instructor who took "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (abelson, Sussman & Sussman [see here SICP]) and mappend the fundamental theories presented therein to whatever language was currently invogue during that class/age.
Mere learning of language, for the fit of mind, is a simplicity - you're talking maybe 4 months at the outside to learn the syntax of $x language, thru and thru. However, with the ideas presented in SICP, you can accomplish nearly any theoretical CS task. The implementation (though fun) is the easy part.
I might recommend your assigning sections apropos to your course from the book as homework; in class, project the particular Java syntax upon those principals presented in the text.
A most rewarding class would result, I think!
From reading the descriptions, some of the following may be too introductory... I'm assuming your students all have bachelor degrees in CS, and are picking up Java as a 3rd or 4th language...
http://computerscience.jbpub.com/languages/java/
http://computerscience.jbpub.com/cs1/java/
The facts have a liberal bias. --The Daily Show
..Thinking In Java IS a great book, but I also think Ivor Horton's "Beginning Java" is another perfectly suited book. There is a 1.4 edition out now. I simply cannot praise "Beginning Java" highly enough, it is the book I used to teach myself. Sometimes he is very verbose, but he certaintly gets the points across.
It all depends on what exactly you are teaching. You could be teaching an introduction to programming, or data structures and algorithms, or Object-Oriented programming, or network computing, or... Java would probably be suitable for either of the items above, and there are textbooks covering each of them.
If you are safely assuming that your students already know how to program (for example in C) and know about data structures, then Java becomes an ideal choice to introduce object-oriented programming. If this is what you want to do, then "Object Oriented Software Development Using Java" by Xiaoping Jia is a very good bet. It introduces OO with UML, talks about patterns, and uses them to discuss the collections framework and Swing. Search for "Jia" on Amazon.com to learn more...
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
Specifically, I would like to ground them in good Object Oriented principles,
Good idea; too many people get out of college even at the Masters/PhD level without really understanding OO. (Even if it's not the be-all, end-all technique it was initially promoted to be, it's still a darned useful way of organizing large programs.)
solid program design techniques,
Sounds like a plan.
and finally in the actual syntax of Java.
Whoops, you're using Java? How does that fit with the first two goals? I can't think of a language that makes good OO harder while still having a "class" keyword.
Oh well, guess you're stuck with it.
Alright, ignoring the potentially flamebait nature of the above (though I mean it quite seriously), if you can avoid it at all, I'd recommend not worrying about teaching syntax. Seriously. Speaking from my experiences at a Certain Other Large Michigan School, you should just be able to say at the beginning of the course, "Hey, we're going to do an assignment in the second half of this course that will be in Java. Know Java by then." and let that be the end of it; we did that in Software Engineering at the grad level and it worked fine.
Just throw them to the sharks; they'll manage.
If you were going to toss Prolog or a heavily functional language at them unexpectedly, that might be worth some in-class time, but in-class time is a scarce resource; it really should only be spent on important stuff either unobtainable, or significantly more difficult to obtain, outside of the class. Java syntax hardly qualifies.
Ya know, "Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days" or "Java for Dummies". I'm sure your students don't want to get bogged down in all sorts of cumbersome theory, but just real-world, practical skills that they'll be able to put to use right away. Thats what these books emphasize, so thats why I'm recommending them.
I've taught Java for a year (undergraduate level though) when I was getting Master's degree, and have assembled a collection of books that publishers sent for evaluation. I think the one you would be pleased with is Object-Oriented Problem Solving with Java.
It's not a book about programming and hence it received one star on Amazon from people who bought it trying to learn Java from scratch while they would have been better served by Deitel&Deitel or Lewis&Loftus.
Chapter 1, for example, goes through "Designing good programs" and "Software life cycle", in Chapter 13 there is a whole section dedicated to threads, not just pure code samples to copy and paste, but discussion targeted towards high-level concepts.
Disclaimer: I have not used the book for any of my classes, just merely browsed it in my spare time.
Used by MIT in the class 6.170 Laboratory in Software Engineering, which is part of the Open Courseware offerings, so you can see the lecture notes and see what they do with it.
"So you've decided to use .NET" by B. Gates
Programming Languages by Sebesta meets most of your requrements.
I recommend Beginning Java Objects: From Concepts to Code, by Jacquie Barker. It looks at object-oriented thinking and design first, and code second. (if I remember correctly, the first part of the book only uses pseudo-code).
JP
Like other said before me, if the point is teaching Java, there's no better book than Bruce Eckle's "Thinking in Java", which is available electronically from Eckle's website. (The 3rd edition is new, I haven't read it specifically. My opinion is based on previous editions.)
I suggest, however, focusing on OOP, rather than on Java. A programmer who groks the fundametal concepts of OOP will have a relatively simple time adapting to the specific tidbits of Java. For this purpose, the best teaching language is Eiffel, and the best book is Object-Oriented Software Construction by Bertrand Meyer.
- Tal Cohen
Intelligence shared is intelligence squared.
I haven't read any other boooks, and I don't intend to. The Core JAVA books has imho excellent quality and explains stuff very well. They also give nice hints and ideas on how to structure your programs, which seems like a much better way than the c++ like approach I would have done.
They contains very simple language and information about the language, so anyone can understand it. They got lots of code examples and a small collection about intresting APIs after each part of text for the commands used in that part.
I can recommand Java Precisely for general Java Syntax. It helped me a lot learning the Syntax and it's pretty compact. Although you might need a book with more examples besides it.
I can certainly understand keeping away from doing a Java-web-developement course when you really want to do a Java course. :-)
I would encourage you to consider using applets because they let you get a pretty graphic in 10 lines of code (which is encourageing to even grad students) and you can have them write a JDBC based client. The benefits of this progject are that it's real-world, it forces them to take the relational tables and populate logical objects, and they will lear a little about Java's dynamic loading capabilities.
Some caveats: Sockets can only talk from the client's computer to the webserver they got the Java applet from. Some one will make this mistake. :-) The teacher must REALLY be on the ball to cover that much material and not overload the learners. I've seen projects like this turn into disasters where students are left without any help by a professor who doesn't consider the "horizon streching" that's going one.
Hope this is helpful. It is a large undertaking and it must be taylored for the caliber students you have. Then again, it's so enterprise-focused that they can't complain that your course is "just a theory course." ;-)
Sam
You might want to check out Introduction to Programming Using Java: An Object-Oriented Approach.
It's what the University of Alberta has used for a couple of years now and it's one of the few text books that I never sold after the course was over.
Strater
I own two Java books and have seen others.. they suck. It isn't that the books aren't well written, it is that Sun's documentation is really good. Just stick with Sun's documentation and you should be fine, IMHO.
For master students, picking up java should be trivial, and you should not spend time on teaching it to them. To avoid too many complaints, cover some introductory java book such as suns java tutorial in the first two weeks, and assume they know it by then. Better yet, cover only the parts of java you will use in those two weeks, and let the students choose their own favourite textbook.
Nescafe might sell them, although I'm still not sure how you plan to teach all of that from a book made of coffee.
Head First Java is published by O'Reilly & Associates. You can more information at www.headfirstjava.com or read the reviews at amazon.com. The best part of this book is that it doesn't assume you understand programming and it spends a large amount of time developing your OOP skills. It uses simple (some times comical) examples with great exercises to help with the learning process. From the hfj website:
See why Tim O'Reilly says, "This is the first really new approach to computer books that I've seen in many years. I think it's going to revolutionize how programming and other complex topics are taught."
Hope this helps.
programming.java is an actual intro textbook. The authors are top notch professors and the book is based around actual programming assignments which is IMHO the only way to learn a language. Unlike most other books it is specifically written for a college+ classroom environment (and has been translated into different human languages). If you look at the authors's other work you will see that its been backed by years of intro programming textbooks in other computer languages.
Although it may be strange to hear of a graduate level introductory class, I have been there.
At my university, one is required to take introductory programming as a physics graduate student. Usually this class is taught in C, but recently they switched over to Java. The class is taught as though no one knows anything about programming (of course, many of us did).
All I can say is...
For the love of God DON'T use java!! Please, please think about what you're doing! Java classes invariably fall into the "class about java, with some programming" category. If you truly are dealing with people who have no programming experiance, the very idea of a compiler will be foreign to them. When you have to explain what "include" does in the first week, you will lose half the class.
Think about it! You have many more problems than which book to use. You're only option with java is to go at the pace the undergrad courses go... because that's what works with java, and then you have to ask yourself what you're doing teaching this class in the first place.
My personal experiance with java was not too bad, but I had programming experiance. Every week, a dozen people with no experiance would live in the professors office seeking help, and that's just not the way you want to do things.
For a good "how to do java right" I would
recommend Effective Java by Josh Bloch,
and Concurrent Programming in Java by Doug Lea.
"Effective Java" by Josh Bloch. The best Java book I've ever read.
On re-reading my original post, I think I see what you were responding to. Note Perl does not have a "class" keyword; that's how bolted on the OO is. In fact I was thinking of Perl when I wrote that phrase. ;-)
I honestly don't know whether I'd consider Perl OO easier or harder then Java; Java sure did fight me, tooth and nail, where Perl doesn't quite fight me that much. On the other hand, Perl is so kooky that that has to count against it.
All the way.
Have the greatest JAVA book I've come across. There's very little of this fumbling around in the dark with concepts as "what's abstraction?" and the like (even though all the high points of the language are hit - almost invisibly - in the text), and instead the book focuses on a more pragmatic approach that I found to be more of an "okay ... so you're a SMART chimp ... now let's take the language out and drive it around a bit", instead of a tome of terms.
Very good book, that. I still use it to check myself against their code for client/server configuarations (in both JAVA and C) and ensure that I'm writing code that's reasonable.
A short answer to your request would be to get Learn to Program with Java by John Smiley to teach the Java language and program construction in the easiest manner ever written. The method taught is very accessible for those who've never written a line of code. Have your students follow the instructions in Don't Fear The OOP! for fun and insight. Then, make the brilliant Teach Yourself Object Oriented Programming in 21 Days by Anthony Sintes the real goal of your course. The first 7 days covers OOP as you won't find in other books, then the following 7 days covers how to design/structure/test applications in OOP. The last 7 days is a fun project building an application using the OOP principles already taught. These two books should cover what your students need. If by chance you run out of time and they don't finish the OOP book, you should still be able to get them through the first 7 days of the material and still finish the Smiley book (which is necessary for the fundamentals). Your students can then continue to finish the Sintes book if they find Java/OOP is something they wish to pursue further.
For students who require more instruction in programming fundamentals, you'll have to be more considerate. More consideration requires a longer answer to your request. You know that OOP is the most important aspect of learning this discipline, but you're stuck with a chicken and egg situation. How can one learn how to build solutions (algorithms/applications) to problems without knowing how to express those ideas first in a language's syntax and semantics? As you've said, your students are assumed to have no programming experience. Well, as a child, before you learned how to speak your mind, you first had to learn HOW to say things.
I would first recommend giving your students a crash course in syntax and semantics. Don't worry if they don't know what to DO with the syntax yet. They first need to become familiar with the alphabet and sentence structures of the language before they can learn how to express their ideas in that language. I'm going to diverge from the rest of the slashdot crowd here by recommending that you use a CBT (Computer Based Training) for this step. It's the quickest way to your goal (about 8-20 hours of computer time) and the interactivity will keep their attention even though the material is very dry (in contrast to the Smiley book). They can run the CBT over and over again until the message of language's rules sink in. This will be most effective with your guidance in filling in the missing information (CBT text is purposely kept terse in order to maximize retention and in order not to lose the user's attention). Use CBTs as homework, or in conjunction with other homework. There are various worthwhile CBTs out there, Smartforce/Smartcertify's or Netg's first module on Java should suffice. Or, Joe Grip's whole set of Java instruction (about 10 hours of computer time, though they claim 5).
If your students really are beginners, I'd even encourage getting a CBT on not just syntax, but on basic programming concepts (iteration, selection, sequence, algorithms...etc). Smartforce/Smartcertify has something on that called Programming Fundamentals or you can get a copy of COMPTONS PROGRAMMING MADE EASY (though you'll need to ignore some minor bugs, not that textb
I learned from Lewis & Loftus' Java Software Solutions and found it quite nice. It teaches Java, but does not focus on applets. It has plenty of good information (covering sytax, classes/objects, inheritence, string processing, exceptions, I/O, software engineering, Swing GUIs, and some applet stuff), not to mention OOP design guidelines, etc. The problems were not so interesting, but the prof. always made his own, which I suggest you do as well, just to keep things lively.
Out of curiousity, what department are you teaching in? Pretty strange for grad students who have a need for programming in their field to have no experience whatsoever.
I assume your students already will know how to program and want to learn the syntax and spirit of Java. For the syntax side of things, the first few chapters of the O'Reilly Java in a Nutshell will suffice, although the rest of the books is largely a recapitulation of the API documentation. This should be coupled with Bloch's excellent Effective Java for the "best practices" thing in that area. For understanding the spirit of Java and the best design principles, I have found that Coad's Java Design incerdibly insightful. These are definitely keeper books.
I'd recommend "Mr. Bunny's Big Cup o' Java". It's a short book and it has funny pictures. What more could a grad student at the U of M need?
Go Bucks! (where the safe choice, Thinking in Java, is recommended)
An Intorduction to Object Oriented Programming with Java by C. Thomas Wu. The book is almost decent, but leaves me wanting a lot more. Another minus is that the binding quickly deteriorates.
It's better.
I can personally recommend Java Software Solutions: Foundations of Program Design , by Lewis & Loftus. We used this textbook (the first edition, link above is the 3rd edition) in an introductory programming class, and it's very focused on program design first, Java second.
I will say, however, that a big part of what made the text successful in our class was the outstanding instructor, who gave a programming assignment every week, of his own design, rather than those from the book. Then again, I loaned my non-technical boss the book, to supplement her readings for the Java class she was taking, and she found it much more helpful than the text assigned by the instructor. In fact, she still hasn't returned it...
Another possibility would be Objects First with Java: A Practical Introduction Using BlueJ . BlueJ is an IDE specifically designed for the teaching of object-oriented programming, using Java. If you go to the BlueJ web site, you can learn more about the IDE (which is freely downloadable) and the pedagogical philosophies behind it.
I should say, I have not had personal experience with this text, just that it sounds like it might fit your requirements fairly well.
Have you considered writing your own book?
I believe Berkeley and MIT still proudly use SICP in their teaching for a CS course or two.
As far as mapping that specific language to another language (say one that is in vogue), it sounds more like the role of a good programming language concepts/fundamentals class. In which case they should be teaching a student how to map any language to another.
Recursion is cool (and SICP is a lot of fun), except when it sucks ass or you need to do something real world that is optimized and may not have a gig of stack to solve a particular solution.
And, ofcourse, Knuth's TAOCP is the real Bible. I might grudgingly call TAOCP the old testament, and the SICP the new testament, but let's face it. Knuth has his shit together, when it comes to explaining CS.
No.
"Master's level Introductory Java Programming class"
...is that a joke?
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
I may be impartial, because my teacher wrote this book. But I was a first year undergrad at RIT and this book reall clarified many things for me. And it's recent, having only been written about a year ago. And most of all, it's focus is more on the software development and thinking that on implementation. Modern Software Development Using JAVA Tymann and Schneider IBSN: 0-534-38449-8
Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementia (There is no great genius without a mixture of madness) - Aristotle
JAVA Principles of Object Oriented Programming, or
JAVA POOP is a pretty good book. It has the additional bonus of having a funny title.
-D
Don't believe me? Here's the URL
Have you tried hardcover yet?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Be sure to check out the this course, which focuses on modular system design.
g -a nd-Computer-Science/6-170Laboratory-in-Software-En gineeringFall2001/CourseHome/index.htm
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineerin