Learn Object-Oriented Java the Hard Way

Next Steps

You made it!

If you finished all the exercises and did the Study Drills and understood what you were doing, then congratulations! Java isn’t an easy language for beginners, so pat yourself on the back or something.

You now know the basics of object-oriented programming with Java, and more importantly, you have a lot of practice reading code, understanding it, and fixing bugs. These are important tools for programmers. With these skills, you should be able to pick up just about any book on programming and handle it just fine.

However, your journey isn’t over yet. Typing in someone else’s programs is hard but writing your own programs from scratch is a lot harder.

Most of my real-life students practiced and learned for four or five more years after working through my assignments before they got jobs in the industry.

Currently, you are lacking in two main areas:

You need a lot more practice, especially writing your own programs.
You don’t know the standard library very well.

You don’t know the standard library.

Professional Java programmers spend a lot of time writing small amounts of code to “glue together” modules written by other people. Many of these are included with Java itself and are available to “import”.

You need a lot more practice.

The students I teach at my public school do use the exercises in this book to start learning, but that’s not all I make them do. They also have to write a lot of programs from scratch. If you haven’t already worked through the assignments at

Programming by Doing

I highly recommend working through them. (They aren’t very object-oriented, though.)

CodingBat - short, targeted practice problems. These are especially good practice for students preparing for the Advanced Placement (AP) exam in Computer Science.
Project Euler - a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

Thanks so much for using my book to start your journey coding. Please tweet @grahammitchell using the hashtag #LJtHW to let me know!

Happy coding!
– Graham Mitchell