Doug Winnie - Essential Java for AP CompSci: From Programming to Computer Science

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Computer science has become a basic life skill that everyone is going to need to learn. Whether you are going into a career or side hustle in business, technology, creativity, architecture, or almost any other field, you will find programming, coding, and computer science play a role.

In fact, if you look at the top skills on LinkedIn for the United States, in the last year all ten of the top were programming, computer science, or code related. These include cloud and distributed computing, statistical analysis, data mining, mobile development, storage systems management, user interface design, network and information security, middleware and integration software, web architecture and development frameworks, algorithm design, and Java development.

What is unique about computer science is how it has become a skill, and not just a career. While there are jobs and titles of Computer Scientist, the skill of computer science, and specifically coding and programming, is almost everywhere.

In marketing, you need to analyze and sift through tons of user data and metrics on how people use your products, website, apps, or services. In medicine, doctors and researchers need to gather and analyze data gathered from clinical studies or to find new breakthroughs. In agriculture and farming, thousands of IoT devices need to be deployed and managed to gather data on soil conditions, humidity, and crop health. In architecture and construction, mapping out and analyzing how people use elevators, building infrastructure, or public spaces can help design better buildings for people to work and live in. Even when building a side business, or hustle, entrepreneurs may need to perform research, build a website, program a mobile app or game, or perform tons of different activities involving code, logic, automation, and programming.

When people create projects based on code, they organize their work into multiple chunks or segments of development. They call these sprints. So, we will learn Java in the same way, using multiple sprints that will teach a single topic to help us keep pace with things along the way. Part of what makes learning coding difficult is it can be difficult to find real-world examples to draw parallels from. If you are planning on taking the AP Exam in Computer Science, many of the questions will not have any real-world context and will require you to understand and follow code without that as a reference.

For you, this can make it confusing, but just remember: there are two sides to programmingwhat is being done and how it happens.

The what is pretty easy, and this gives the code context, like parsing transit data, rolling a virtual die, or adding sales data for a quarter together.

How it happens is a completely different story however. This is where you need to break things down into individual steps and start to think like a computer. A computer is going to think only about one single step at a time. It has no concept of what comes next or what came before it. It only is concerned with the present. So, if it cant find somethingyou get an error. If it tries to do something that doesnt existyou get an error. If you try doing something out of orderyou guessed it, you get an error.