Instructor: Phillip Conrad, Assistant Professor, CIS Dept, University of Delaware
(1) Head First Java, 2nd Edition.,
By Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates
Second Edition: February 2005
Series: Head First
ISBN 10: 0-596-00920-8
ISBN 13: 9780596009205
Pages: 720
This is our main text for learning Java. If you haven't seen a "Head First" before, you may see all the pictures, cartoons, and the informal writing style, and be misled into thinking it is a "for dummies" style book. However, that is most certainly not the case.
Rather, this is a book that uses a variety of ways to grab your attention and challenge your thinking so that you retain what you read. I've used this book series for both CISC103 (HTML) and CISC474 (Java Servlets/JSPs), and the reviews have been almost universally positive.
Because the summer session is short, we will need to SPEED through this book. I will expect you to read 3-5 chapters each week for the first 6 week of the semester. Yes, you read that correctly—3-5 chapters per week! We need to get through all the reading within the first six weeks, so that we have 4 weeks left to actually USE what we've learned. Fortunatley, the breezy writing style, abundance of pictures and stories, etc., should make that less painful than it might otherwise be.
(2) Java Extreme Programming Cookbook, By Eric M. Burke, Brian M. Coyner
First Edition: March 2003
Series: Cookbooks
ISBN 10: 0-596-00387-0
ISBN 13: 9780596003876
Pages: 288
This book provides a brief introduction to "eXtreme Programming (XP)", which is a particular way of approaching software development. You can read an little bit about XP here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
XP is controversial, but it is also influential, so I want us to approach it with a critical eye. My plan regarding XP is not to advocate for or against it, or to teach it as ideology (though in the case of test-driven-development, I probably will be crossing the line into advocacy!
Rather, I want us to learn about it, sample a few of its practices, including pair programming, using stories to drive development, and using test-driven development. Our aim should not be to take a side "for" or "against" XP, but rather to learn about XP, and experiment
with it, and adopt the practices that turn out to helpful and useful.
In the process of looking at XP, this book also covers two very useful tools that will be required: Ant and JUnit. One of the main reasons I'm teaching CISC370 this summer is that students in the capstone course, CISC475, reported that they wished they had learned about Ant and JUnit sooner. So, I'm going to try to see if we can respond to that feedback by incorporating Ant and JUnit into the curriculum for CISC370.
An option you may want to consider is an O'Reilly Safari Subscription. This allows you full text access (via the internet) to a "bookshelf" of O'Reilly textbooks. Both of the books we are using in this course are available through this system. For $20/month, you can have full access to these two books, plus either others.
If you have a credit card, you can try out safari for 10 days for free at http://safari.oreilly.com.
