Open Serendipity

I finished the first seven chapters of Objects First with Java, yay!   It was fun.  I love the approach of teaching about the objects first, just as the title says, and using the bluej environment to manipulate objects in a visual way that is familiar to anyone using computers today, much more so than the old command line approach that was common in the 1980′s when I learned Pascal at UC Berkeley.  (Yes!  My first programming class at Berkeley was luckily in Pascal, not Fortran!)

With this object focus, the authors do not introduce the concept of the main method, public static void main(String args[]), until the end of Chapter 7!   I think this is great!  It is an easy concept by then, makes total sense, instead of being just some weird inexplicable convention, and the exercises to have the student take some of their programs out of bluej and run them standalone is a nice reward at the end of Part 1 of the textbook.  Liberating.  Yes, you are Really Programming Now, in case there was any doubt.

Now if I can just find some eager students who want to learn Java programming……

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Books, Tech by marla