Reading for CIS 211

All readings are from your text: Java Software Solutions, John Lewis and William Loftus. I emphasize again that although reading about programming concepts is helpful, you must practice these concepts. Also don't waste your time memorizing syntax. Here are my recommendations for effective study:

Type every program I give in lecture and that's in the relevant pages in the book, and make sure you understand the structure of the program. Experiment with little changes in the code.
Write as many similar programs by yourself. Whenever you have a question or a doubt, write a small program to test it. Use the books as a backup to confirm your understanding.

Prerequisites

Things from CIS 210 that you should be familiar with. These concepts are combined and used collectively to write simple programs in CIS 211.

Topic	Sec. and Pages	Comments

Declarations; Assignments	3.2, 79-82 and 4.3, 131-133	Absolutely fundamental
I/O	3.3, 83-89	Needed for Lab 3
Objects vs Classes	4.1, 122-125
Methods; Scope of local variables	4.4, 134-140	Read Key Concept on p. 135 once a day
Elements of a class definition	4.5, 140-143
Encapsulation	4.6, 143-147
Arrays	6.1, 208-232

Reading for New CIS 211 Concepts

The idea of a class hierarchy is in Section 8.3, pp.305-307. So far, all the classes in our simple hierarchies must respond to the same methods. If there is not enough information to implement a method, the method is declared abstract. Abstract methods and classes are discussed in Section 9.1, pp. 332-338.
Exceptions are a simple class hierarchy whose objects can be thrown and caught. For a motivation of exceptions, consult the lecture material (the code is online). For the details, consult Section 14.1, pp. 488-498.
To write non-trivial programs such as the one in the lab, we need to organize the code in packages and use interfaces to precisely communicate the requirements of a class implementation. See Sections 9.2 and 9.3, pp. 338-352 for details.
Class hierarchies are related by a programming notion called inheritance. This is discussed in Chapter 8.

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