This 4 day course is designed for those wishing to learn the Java programming language. This course is a primer for more advanced Java courses. The emphasis is on the Java language and the core APIs. It covers the new features introduced in Java 5. The practical exercises constitute about 50% of the course time. They use console applications rather than graphical applications to gain familiarity with Java. Graphics is a large subject which is best left to a more advanced course.

 Prerequisites

This 4 day course assumes knowledge of the basics of the C-like family of languages, such as C, C++ or C#. If you do not already have this knowledge, then there is a 5 day version of this which spends more time on the Java language and has additional exercises to gain familiarity with the Java programming constructs.

 Course Content

Introduction
- What is Java?
- Java Environments and the Java Virtual Machine
- Java versus C++
- Object Oriented Programming
- A first program
- Packages and file layout
- ANT
- Exercise to set up a Java programming environment

The Java Language
- Comments and javadoc
- Methods
- Basic data types
- Java 5 enums
- Input and output
- Operators
- Conditional statements
- Looping constructs
- Java 5 varargs
- Exercise to write a menu driven console application

Classes and Objects
- Data encapsulation
- Java classes, packages and visibility
- Constructors
- Object life cycles, finalizers and garbage collection
- Exercise to create product objects

Inheritence and polymorphism
- Inheritence
- Constructors and initialisation
- Interfaces
- Casting and instanceof
- Inner classes
- Polymorphism
- Java 5 annotations
- Exercise to build polymorphic objects

Complex data types
- Object wrappers
- Java 5 autoboxing/unboxing
- Strings, StringBuffers and Arrays
- Collections
- Java 5 generics
- Java 5 foreach loop
- Exercise to use collections

Exception handling
- Exceptions
- Exception handling
- Throwing and rethrowing exceptions
- Using finally
- Exercise to use exceptions

Streams
- The stream hierarchy
- Keyboard input explained
- File handling
- Object streaming
- Exercise to backup and restore objects to file

Threads and Applets
- Java Applets
- Threads
- Runnable classes
- Synchronisation
- Exercise to write a bouncing lines applet

Networking
- URLs
- TCP and UDP
- Sockets and connections
- Multi-threaded server applications
- Exercise to write a client server application