Programming Tutorial: Java 9 for beginners 2018

John D K -

Programming is extremely popular nowadays mostly because of the high salaries and good job offerings. Everyone wants to know if he can start a career of a programmer. This tutorial is intended for those people who wants to try with programming in 2018.

The tutorial is adapted to latest technologies, tools and trends. You don't need previous experience in programming or math. All you need is to find 0,5 or 1 hour per day to practice, 5 days per week. This is completely enough for the beginning. Later you will need a bit more time and involvement.

What is programming

By definition programming is a way of instructing a computer how to perform a task or several task in parallel. Programming is done by using a computer language which tells the computer exactly what needs to be done. Modern computers do billions of operations per second. In this tutorial we are going to use java 9 as a computer language and for all examples. Some of the example could have code in different language just for the sake of completeness and better understanding of the process.

Programming has several different stages

  • Specification - find and define a problem
  • write an automated mail
  • find all people in New York
  • write a program which replace human task
  • Design - planning solution
  • Find the optimal steps to solve it
  • Implementation
  • write and compile your code
  • Test phase - verify that program perform the planned solution
  • Deployment - deliver the product to the customer

Your first program

This program is written in Java 9 and all you need is to run it. It may look a bit complex at the moment but is really simple one and easy to read. All it does is to print a message on the console: Hello,World!

public class HelloWorld {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello, World!");
    }
}

you can check the python version of this program:

print("Hello, World!")

As you can see the languages can differ a lot. Both programs do one and the same thing but has different syntax flavor.

Notes:

  • language is not important if you know what do you need
  • after mastering one language you will be able to do a fast transition to another one
  • the code should be readable and easy to understand
  • most of the languages are case sensitive - class HelloWorld is different from class Helloworld
  • you need a documentation in order to refer the language basics

Tools or so called IDE

If you want to follow this tutorial you will need to set up your working environment. This can be tricky sometimes and leads to confusion for beginners. In order to use online tools you can try with :

If you want to use and IDE (integrated development tool) then you can use Eclipse OXYGEN or IntelliJ IDEA for java

Eclipse is free software platform for developing Java ( and not only ) applications while IntelliJ has paid and free version. In my practice as a programmer I'm using both. But recently I found IntelliJ better for my productivity.

Homework

All programmers need to be very good at finding information. So in order to do your homework you will need to use your favorite search engine and to find some of the solutions. If you have question you can ask below.

  1. Create program that prints "Hello, Java 9!"
  2. Write a program that print your name
  3. Write a program that prints current date
  4. Write a program that prints numbers from 1 to 100
  5. install Eclipse or IntelliJ
    5.1) Create a project and run the program
    5.2) Write a program that calculate how many days are there from 01/01/2018
  6. find out the difference between Java 9 and python

P.S. the course will be change in dual language course: Bilingual programming education in Java and Python