A Java Course Introduction

Java 1.2 Introduction

Java is a write-once run-anywhere language. What this means in practice is that the Java code you create on a PC should run quite happily on a mainframe or Unix machine.

Java also is an Object Oriented programming language that can be used to create stand-alone programs or browser-compatible code (applets).

Learning Java, like any programming language, is a “doing” as well as reading activity. You will find many exercises and self test question throughout this booklet. It is strongly recommended that you attempt each exercise and question. Do not be tempted to skip over questions because they seem difficult. Each exercise has an answer (in fact in programming, there are usually several solutions.)

Course Overview

This course will first discuss the Java runtime environment
and the syntax of the Java programming language. It will then cover
Object-Oriented (OO) concepts as they apply to Java. As the course progresses,
advanced features of the Java platform are discussed.

Whilst Java is a platform independent language, the course was
created on a Microsoft operating environment. Screen shots will differ from
those obtained when working in another operating system such as Unix or
Macintosh. The code, however, remains the same. In other words, the contents of
this course is applicable to all Java operating system ports.

Course Objectives

Upon completion of this course module, you should be able to:

• Describe key language features


• Compile and run a Java application


• Understand and use the online hypertext Java documentation


• Describe language syntactic elements and constructs


• Understand the object-oriented paradigm and use object-oriented features of the language


• Understand and use exceptions


• Develop a graphical user interface


• Develop a program to take input from a GUI


• Understand event handling


• Read and write to files and other sources of data


• Perform input/output (I/O) to all sources without the use of a GUI


• Create applications and applets to access an Oracle database


• Understand the basic concepts of JDBC


• Understand the basics of multithreading


• Develop multithreaded Java applications and applets