College Level Computer Science With Java (Unit 3)

The successful student (and my students are always successful) will have a solid understanding of Java and be able to write significant programs. They will understand polymorphism (and love it). They will understand recursion, maybe even tail recursion. They will have a sense of the operating system. They will be prepared to take most sophomore and junior level college classes.

In the first unit, homework will be light, under an hour per class. Once we begin programming in unit two, that will go up to about two hours of programming homework per class hour. There will be occasional short readings in the later units.

Day 1: 32-bit Instruction Sets, Eniac, Strings, StringBuffer, Precompiler, Overloading Operators, C++ User-Definable Macros vs. Java, Expression Evaluator
Day 2: "No IFs", Debugging, Polymorphism, Encapsulation, Camel Case, Pre-OOP: FTN, Pascal, C, Lisp, Basic, Spaghetti Code, Shadowing Variables, Read-Eval-Print Loop
Day 3: "Hacks", Syntactic Sugar, Test Driven Development, Default Constructors, "=" vs. "==", super methods, Lists, Hashtables
Day 4: instanceof, Type Casting (cf: C, C++), Generic Type Declarations, The Troubled Switch Statement, Parallel IFs, 2-D Arrays, C++ Arrays, Introducing Sudoku
Day 5: Sorting, Naming Conventions, Precision vs. Accuracy, Generic "for" Loops, Building Sudoku
Day 6: Interlinked Networks, Printing, Sudoku Code, Independent Solver Objects, Fixed Point Calculations
Day 7: Mathematical Facts vs. Approximate Calculations, Writing a Sort, Functional Programming vs. Side Effects, Variable Scope
Day 8: Exhaustive Search, "Solved" Problems, Binding vs. Assignment, Packages, Hardware Interrupts, Handlers

1 hour 50 minutes per week in class, and an estimated 1 - 2 hours per week outside of class.

In addition to the Outschool classroom, this class uses Java Information.