Basic Java Programming for Developers New to OO

Course Objectives

This “skills-centric” course is about 50% hands-on lab and 50% lecture, designed to train attendees in core OO coding and Java development skills, coupling the most current, effective techniques with the soundest industry practices. Our engaging instructors and mentors are highly experienced practitioners who bring years of current "on-the-job" experience into every classroom.

Working in a hands-on learning environment, guided by our expert team, attendees will learn to:

• Understand what OO programming is and what the advantages of OO are in today's world
• Work with objects, classes, and OO implementations
• Understand the basic concepts of OO such as encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, and abstraction
• Understand not only the fundamentals of the Java language, but also its importance, uses, strengths and weaknesses
• Understand the basics of the Java language and how it relates to OO programming and the Object Model
• Learn to use Java exception handling
• Understand and use classes, inheritance and polymorphism
• Understand and use collections, generics, autoboxing, and enumerations
• Become familiar with the concept of functional programming using Lambda Expressions
• Process large amounts of data using the Stream API introduced in Java 8
• Discover the new Date/Time API
• Use the JDBC API for database access
• Work with annotations
• Take advantage of the Java tooling that is available with the programming environment being used in the class
• Java 8 Features: Lambda Expressions, Method and Constructor references, The Streams API, Collectors, The Optional class

Course Prerequisites

This is an basic-level Java programming course, designed for experienced developers who wish to get up and running with Java, or who need to reinforce sound Java coding practices, immediately.  Attendees should have a working knowledge of developing OO software applications. 

Follow-On Courses / Take After: Our core Java training courses provide students with a solid foundation for continued learning based on role, goals, or their areas of specialty.  Our Java developer learning paths offer a wide variety of follow-on courses such as:

• Continued Java & JEE training: Intermediate to Advanced Java, JEE Essentials, Java for Web, Spring / Spring Boot, Microservices / Web Services / REST, Reactive Java Programming / RxJava, Tuning & Performance, Design Patterns & More
• TDD / Test Driven Development, JUnit / Unit Testing, Agile development training
• Secure Java Coding / Java Security and secure application development training
• Mobile developer / Android training

Course Agenda

Please note that this list of topics is based on our standard course offering, evolved from typical industry uses and trends. We will work with you to tune this course and level of coverage to target the skills you need most.

Session: Java: A First Look

Lesson: The Java Platform

• Java Platforms
• Lifecycle of a Java Program
• Responsibilities of JVM
• Documentation and Code Reuse

Lesson: Using the JDK

• Setting Up Environment
• Locating Class Files
• Compiling Package Classes
• Source and Class Files
• Java Applications

Lesson: The Eclipse Paradigm

• Workbench and Workspace
• Views
• Editors
• Perspectives
• Projects
• Tutorial: Working with Eclipse

Lesson: Writing a Simple Class

• Classes in Java
• Class Modifiers and Types
• Class Instance Variables
• Primitives vs. Object References
• Creating Objects

Session: OO Concepts

Lesson: Object-Oriented Programming

• Real-World Objects
• Classes and Objects
• Object Behavior
• Methods and Messages

Lesson: Inheritance, Abstraction, and Polymorphism

• Encapsulation
• Inheritance
• Method Overriding
• Polymorphism

Session: Getting Started with Java

Lesson: Adding Methods to the Class

• Passing Parameters into Methods
• Returning a Value from a Method
• Overloaded Methods
• Constructors
• Optimizing Constructor Usage

Lesson: Language Statements

• Operators
• Comparison and Logical Operators
• Looping
• Continue and Break Statements
• The switch Statement
• The for-each() Loop

Lesson: Using Strings

• Strings
• String Methods
• String Equality
• StringBuffer
• StringBuilder

Lesson: Specializing in a Subclass

• Extending a Class
• Casting
• The Object Class
• Default Constructor
• Implicit Constructor Chaining

Session: Essential Java Programming

Lesson: Fields and Variables

• Instance vs. Local Variables: Usage Differences
• Data Types
• Default Values
• Block Scoping Rules
• Final and Static Fields
• Static Methods

Lesson: Using Arrays

• Arrays
• Accessing the Array
• Multidimensional Arrays
• Copying Arrays
• Variable Arguments

Lesson: Java Packages and Visibility

• Class Location of Packages
• The Package Keyword
• Importing Classes
• Executing Programs
• Java Naming Conventions

Session: Advanced Java Programming

Lesson: Inheritance and Polymorphism

• Polymorphism: The Subclasses
• Upcasting vs. Downcasting
• Calling Superclass Methods from Subclass
• The final Keyword

Lesson: Interfaces and Abstract Classes

• Separating Capability from Implementation
• Abstract Classes
• Implementing an Interface
• Abstract Classes vs. Interfaces

Lesson: Exceptions

• Exception Architecture
• Handling Multiple Exceptions
• Automatic Closure of Resources
• Creating Your Own Exceptions
• Throwing Exceptions
• Checked vs. Unchecked Exceptions

Session: Java Developer's Toolbox

Lesson: Utility Classes

• Wrapper Classes
• The Number Class
• Random Numbers
• Autoboxing/Unboxing
• The Date Class

Lesson: Enumerations and Static Imports

• Enumeration Syntax
• When You Should Use Enumerations
• Using Static Imports
• When You Should Use Static Imports

Lesson: The new Date/Time API

• Introduce the new Date/Time API
• LocalDate, LocalDateTime, etc.
• Formatting Dates
• Working with time zones
• Manipulate date/time values

Lesson: Formatting Strings

• StringJoiner
• String.format
• System.out.printf
• The Formatter class
• Using the formatting syntax

Session: Collections and Generics

Lesson: Introduction to Generics

• Generics and Subtyping
• Bounded Wildcards
• Generic Methods
• Legacy Calls to Generics
• When Generics Should Be Used

Lesson: Collections

• Characterizing Collections
• Collection Interface Hierarchy
• Iterators
• The Set Interface
• The List Interface
• Queue Interface
• Map Interfaces
• Using the Right Collection
• Collections and Multithreading

Session: Lambda Expressions; Collections and Streams

Lesson: Introduction to Lambda Expressions

• Functional vs OO Programming
• Anonymous Inner-classes
• Lambda Expression Syntax
• Functional Interfaces
• Method references
• Constructor references

Lesson: Java 8 Collection Updates

• Introduce the ConcurrentHashMap
• Lambda expressions and Collections

Lesson: Streams

• Processing Collections of data
• The Stream interface
• Reduction and Parallelism
• Filtering collection data
• Sorting Collection data
• Map collection data
• Find elements in Stream
• Numeric Streams
• Create infinite Streams
• Sources for using Streams

Lesson: Collectors

• Creating Collections from a Stream
• Group elements in the Stream
• Multi-level grouping of elements
• Partitioning Streams

Session: Java Application Development

Lesson: Introduction to Annotations

• Annotations Overview
• Working with Java Annotations

Lesson: Java Data Access JDBC API

• Connecting to the Database
• Statement and PreparedStatement
• ResultSet
• Executing Inserts, Updates, and Deletes
• Controlling Transactions and Concurrency