Java beginner topics

Getting Started

• Examine Java technology
• Analyze a simple Java technology application
• Execute a Java technology application

Object-Oriented Programming

• Define modeling concepts: abstraction, encapsulation, and packages
• Discuss Java technology application code reuse
• Define class, member, attribute, method, constructor, and package
• Use the access modifiers private and public as appropriate for the guidelines of encapsulation
• Invoke a method on a particular object
• Use the Java technology API online documentation

Identifiers, Keywords, and Types

• Use comments in a source program
• Distinguish between valid and invalid identifiers
• Use the eight primitive types
• Define literal values for numeric and textual types
• Define the terms primitive variable and reference variable
• Declare variables of class type
• Construct an object using new and describe default initialization
• Describe the significance of a reference variable

Expressions and Flow Control

• Distinguish between instance and local variables
• Describe how to initialize instance variables
• Recognize, describe, and use Java software operators
• Distinguish between legal and illegal assignments of primitive types
• Identify Boolean expressions and their requirements in control constructs
• Recognize assignment compatibility and required casts in fundamental types
• Use if, switch, for, while, and do constructions and the labeled forms of break and continue as flow control structures in a program

Arrays

• Declare and create arrays of primitive, class, or array types
• Explain why elements of an array are initialized
• Explain how to initialize the elements of an array
• Determine the number of elements in an array
• Create a multidimensional array
• Write code to copy array values from one array to another

Class Design

• Define inheritance, polymorphism, overloading, overriding, and virtual method invocation
• Use the access modifiers protected and the default (package-friendly)
• Describe the concepts of constructor and method overloading
• Describe the complete object construction and initialization operation

Advanced Class Features

• Create static variables, methods, and initializers
• Create final classes, methods, and variables
• Create and use enumerated types
• Use the static import statement
• Create abstract classes and methods
• Create and use an interface

Exceptions and Assertions

• Define exceptions
• Use try, catch, and finally statements
• Describe exception categories
• Identify common exceptions
• Develop programs to handle your own exceptions
• Use assertions
• Distinguish appropriate and inappropriate uses of assertions
• Enable assertions at runtime

Collections and Generics Framework

• Describe the general purpose implementations of the core interfaces in the Collections framework
• Examine the Map interface
• Examine the legacy collection classes
• Create natural and custom ordering by implementing the Comparable and Comparator interfaces
• Use generic collections and type parameters in generic classes
• Refactor existing non-generic code
• Write a program to iterate over a collection
• Examine the enhanced for loop

I/O Fundamentals

• Write a program that uses command-line arguments and system properties
• Examine the Properties class
• Construct node and processing streams, and use them appropriately
• Serialize and deserialize objects
• Distinguish readers and writers from streams, and select appropriately between them

Console I/ O and File I/O

• Read data from the console
• Write data to the console
• Describe files and file I/O

Building Java GUIs Using the Swing API

• Describe the JFC Swing technology
• Identify the Swing packages
• Describe the GUI building blocks: containers, components, and layout managers
• Examine top-level, general-purpose, and special-purpose properties of container
• Examine components
• Examine layout managers
• Describe the Swing single-threaded model
• Build a GUI using Swing components

Handling GUI-Generated Events

• Define events and event handling
• Examine the Java SE event model
• Describe GUI behavior
• Determine the user action that originated an event
• Develop event listeners
• Describe concurrency in Swing-based GUIs and describe the features of the SwingWorker class

GUI-Based Applications

• Describe how to construct a menu bar, menu, and menu items in a Java GUI
• Understand how to change the color and font of a component

Threads

• Define a thread
• Create separate threads in a Java technology program, controlling the code and data that are used by that thread
• Control the execution of a thread and write platform-independent code with threads
• Describe the difficulties that might arise when multiple threads share data
• Use wait and notify to communicate between threads
• Use synchronized to protect data from corruption

Networking

• Develop code to set up the network connection
• Understand TCP/IP
• Use ServerSocket and Socket classes to implement TCP/IP clients and servers