Kingsley Sage - Concise Guide to Object-Oriented Programming: An Accessible Approach Using Java (Undergraduate Topics in Computer Science)

Undergraduate Topics in Computer Science (UTiCS) delivers high-quality instructional content for undergraduates studying in all areas of computing and information science. From core foundational and theoretical material to final-year topics and applications, UTiCS books take a fresh, concise, and modern approach and are ideal for self-study or for a one- or two-semester course. The texts are all authored by established experts in their fields, reviewed by an international advisory board, and contain numerous examples and problems, many of which include fully worked solutions.

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The twenty-first century continues to experience the relentless expansion of the IT revolution into our daily lives. We consume services, do our shopping on-line, listen to music streams and watch movies on demand. The impact of social media has had a profound impact on our society and has changed fundamentally the way we obtain and consume news, information and ideas. There is little sign of a slowdown in this dramatic shift in our relationship with technology. Vast research budgets are being applied to the development of autonomous vehicles, and in applying Artificial Intelligence to change the way we live. But it has also changed the demand for skills within our workforce. The demand for manual skills is in decline, and the demand for IT and programming skills is rising at an unprecedented rate.

In comparison to the industrialists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the twenty-first-century entrepreneurs are experts in IT, programming, software design and development, and developing practical applications using concepts such as Artificial Intelligence for our daily lives. With this profound paradigm shift has come a need for the workforce of many industrialised nations to evolve. Governments recognise the need for a huge increase in the workforce with programming skills. In the United Kingdom, and in many other industrialised nations, core coding skills are now a part of the secondary school curriculum. Learning to program is no longer considered to be just a part of the traditional journey of the Computer Science undergraduate, but a broader skill that underpins an IT literate workforce for the modern age.

When I was first approached to write this book, it was suggested that its purpose was to provide an accessible introduction to coding and the world of Object Oriented Programming (OOP). Standard texts on the subject often fall between those that provide only a very lightweight treatment of the subject (a little knowledge can be a frustrating thing), and those that run to 500 pages or more that are rather better suited as reference texts or as support on a lengthy period of study in depth. The challenge for this book is to provide an accessible introduction to the world of coding and OOP in a way that is helpful to the first-time coder and allows them to develop and to understand their knowledge and skills in a way that is relevant and practical. The examples developed for this book are intended to show how OOP skills can be used to create applications and programs that have everyday value, rather than examples that have been synthesised solely to demonstrate an academic point.

The reader should be able to use this book to develop a solid appreciation of OOP and how to code. The programming language used throughout is Java. Java has been chosen as it can be used across all computing platforms, because it has a commercial skill that has a clear on-going value derived from its adoption as a core language for smartphone applications on the Android platform, and as the language at the heart of the Java EE 8 Jakarta Enterprise scale framework. The book focusses on the core Java language and does not consider smartphone or EE 8 coding, as these require skills over and above what this book is about. However, a knowledge of core Java coding and some of the related issues also discussed in this book would form an appropriate pre-requisite for the further study of these topics.

Although this book uses Java as its illustrative programming language, many of the ideas may be translated directly into other OO languages such as C++, C# and others. Throughout this book, programming in Java is demonstrated using the BlueJ Integrated Development Environment (IDE). BlueJ is a well-established IDE for learning BlueJ and is widely used in schools and Universities. Eclipse is the closest product to an industry standard for the development of Java, but it is often found too complex for the task of teaching and learning.