I reviewed the first chapter of a school textbook on Java programming for beginning programmers.

I had read this book, or at least the first two chapters in May 2002. I was trying out a first year course in Java programming that spring. I withdrew from the course and did not complete the course. Instead in the summer term that year I studied wrongful convictions in an advanced sociology course in criminology. I withdrew because I was failing to complete the first programming assignment properly.

Tonight, I read quickly the first chapter by scanning for keywords and reviewing. In fact, the first three chapters of this book are basic programming which I have known from the middle 1970's.

There is even some connecting in the book of objects and methods with variables and functions; in other words, there are connections made between the procedural programming I was taught in the 1970's and 1980's, with the object oriented programming students are taught these days and in this book.

Mostly I reviewed in chapter 1 the JAVA specific learning that I have not really used yet. But much of this applies to programming in SAS or XML, as well as it applies in Java. In particular, the naming rules for variables or name space concepts are almost the same in all three languages.

Here is the bibliographic cite for this first year JAVA programming book:

Savitch, Walter. Java: An Introduction to Computer Science & Programming (Upper Saddle River: N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1999).

This book covers basic programming with JAVA. I reviewed the first chapter tonight and will review chapter two soon. Then I have ten more chapters to read. I will practice writing JAVA with the Code Warrior software. I found out tonight there is also a copy of Code Warrior for the Mac on the book's CD but none of my present Macs have an older copy of Mac OS to run this no doubt.