This
book assumes that you have some programming familiarity; you understand that a
program is a collection of statements, the idea of a subroutine/function/macro,
control statements such as “if” and looping constructs such as
“while,” etc. However, you might have learned this in many places,
such as programming with a macro language or working with a tool like Perl. As
long as you’ve programmed to the point where you feel comfortable with
the basic ideas of programming, you’ll be able to work through this book.
Of course, the book will be
easier
for the C programmers and more so for the C++ programmers, but don’t
count yourself out if you’re not experienced with those languages (but
come willing to work hard). I’ll be introducing the concepts of
object-oriented programming and Java’s basic control mechanisms, so
you’ll be exposed to those, and the first exercises will involve the
basic control-flow statements.
Although
references will often be made to C and C++ language features, these are not
intended to be insider comments, but instead to help all programmers put Java
in perspective with those languages, from which, after all, Java is descended.
I will attempt to make these references simple and to explain anything that I
think a non- C/C++ programmer would not be familiar with.