I was taught java using bluej, this had its ups and downs. Its a great way of teaching object oriented principals as its visual display of classes, inheritance and interdependancy can help to hammer in a lot of abstract principals to those not used to dealing with them. The downside is its not a very good ide, while it was good to learn with its not somthing id choose to write code with. It dosnt force people to use main methods when programing so frequently you'll see people writing code which compiles and runs under bluej but is useless within the real world.
I'd still recommend learning it the way i did, get the principals of programing down show them all the pretty things it does and warn them about its naughty features. Then when theyre comfortable with bluej get the writing code without it, command line tools and whatever text editor you like. Once they can write code in bluej, they can transfer their skills to notepad and javac. Once your used to writing code in both then you can work with anything handed to you, vi, emacs, jbuilder, eclipse all of it.
Just make sure they stop using bluej when you tell em to. At the end of my first year its frightening how many people havnt made the step away from it.
Slashdot Mirror
Finally they make somthing capable of powering quad sli graphics and the cooling system neccessry to stop it burning though the floor!
I was taught java using bluej, this had its ups and downs. Its a great way of teaching object oriented principals as its visual display of classes, inheritance and interdependancy can help to hammer in a lot of abstract principals to those not used to dealing with them. The downside is its not a very good ide, while it was good to learn with its not somthing id choose to write code with. It dosnt force people to use main methods when programing so frequently you'll see people writing code which compiles and runs under bluej but is useless within the real world.
I'd still recommend learning it the way i did, get the principals of programing down show them all the pretty things it does and warn them about its naughty features. Then when theyre comfortable with bluej get the writing code without it, command line tools and whatever text editor you like. Once they can write code in bluej, they can transfer their skills to notepad and javac. Once your used to writing code in both then you can work with anything handed to you, vi, emacs, jbuilder, eclipse all of it.
Just make sure they stop using bluej when you tell em to. At the end of my first year its frightening how many people havnt made the step away from it.
anyway have a look at bluej herebluej