homework : Java Glossary

Asking others to do your homework is as silly as hiring a personal trainer to do your Nautilus exercises for you.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sources for Getting Help

• getting started. How to get your first program working. This mostly concerns installing the compiler and runtime and getting your first HelloWorld program working.
• newsgroups. How to ask questions in the comp.lang.java newsgroups in a way that is most likely to generate a useful answer. If you simply post your homework assignment verbatim, people will slap you senseless. Don’t even dare directly quote so much as a phrase from it!
• tackling. How to tackle difficult problems by breaking them down into simpler ones.
• Patricia Shanahan’s advice for beginning Java programmers.
• The Java Gotchas. This will warn you about all the tricky things in the Java language and standard libraries, the places newbies always fall on their noses.

Do you want to learn?

You are so fortunate at this time in your life to have the luxury of sufficient money, time and disentanglement from others, without job and financial obligations to spend most of your time just satisfying curiosity. You will unlikely ever have an opportunity like this ever again in your life. You will kick your self over and oner and over if you blow it.

You may excuse yourself cheating because you need the course for your diploma. Your diploma proves to your prospective employers that you know certain material thoroughly and are fully up to speed. What happens on day one of your new job when you are expected to handle even much more difficult problems than the ones you avoided in school on much tighter timelines? You will be fired time after time until you find a way to learn the material you avoided or go into some other field.

Let me repeat myself in slightly differnt words because it is very important you understand this, not out of any sort of morality, but simply for your own self interest.

The goal is not to produce a program to solve the prof’s exercise, but to improve your coding skills. If someone wrote it for you, only his skills would be improved.

It is, of course, possible to bamboozle or pay someone to do your homework assignments for you. This, in my view is a waste of money. You paid the school to teach you and now you are subverting their efforts and wasting years of your own time. You would have been wiser to spend the money you spent on tuition for a vacation to Jamaica. I’m sure you would enjoy it much more. Further, it will be dreadfully embarrassing if you get your diploma, your first job and your first assignment and then have no clue how to start. Everyone will expect you to know what you are doing. There will be no one to help you.

Consider how utterly absurd it is to buy an expensive education then hand it away for free on the Internet to others and then get nothing for yourself. Further, you set yourself up for extreme embarrassment when you are exposed as an ignorant fraud on your first day on the job. You will never again have the luxury that you have now of sufficient time for study. Take it.

Tactics

In Java every new thing depends on thoroughly understanding everything that came before. If you do that, progress is steady and easy. If try to skip over something, all of a sudden everything becomes impossible Greek.

The only way to recover is to back up and start reading what does make sense and step by step, working the examples, not just reading, take a second run at it.

After you have filled in the hole in the prequisite knowlededge, when you re-encounter the roadblock that earlier caused you so much trouble, all will be crystal clear and you will wonder what all the fuss was about. What did this used to seem so hard?

Trust me on this. I used to teach at UBC (University of British Columbia). None of my students ever failed.

The temptation is to panic and try to race ahead. Sorry, but it just won’t work, no matter how far behind you are, or how close the deadline. You have textbooks, course notes, examples, CD (Compact Disc) s, tutors, online FAQs (Frequently Asked Questionses). Use these resources, backing up as far as necessary to pick up those points you missed the first time through.

Just put on a pot of high-quality coffee, unplug the phone and do a burn starting early in the day and staying up as late as a you possibly can, ordering a large pizza when you get hungry. Even pros have to do this when the get lost in some tricky new API (Application Programming Interface).

Hiring Roedy as Coach