Duke University — Java Programming: Solving Problems with Software-Week One

Credit for the image goes to JAVA and Duke University

I began the second course in the Java Programming and Software Engineering Fundamentals specialization offered by Duke University. This course acts as a second introductory course, quite similar to the first course. Many of the videos in the introduction to this course might as well be copies of the videos for the first course Programming Fundamentals with JavaScript, HTML and CSS. My review of which you can view here.

This course begins by describing how to declare variables, what the variable types are and why to use the ones you choose to use. They go through the seven step process and cover how to build an algorithm. The problem they discuss solving is computing a shape’s perimeter. After walking through how to calculate a shape’s perimeter, they give you a list of several tasks to write code for. These pieces are moderately challenging and provide the programmer with a greater understanding of the material taught. This assignment is immediately followed by a quiz that asks questions of you that the code you have written can solve quite easily. This quiz is in place to not only prevent students who have not written the code from continuing, but also to help students debug their code.

All in all, the first week of this course is fantastic and I look forward to the next week.