I have been teaching beginners how to code for the better part of two decades. More than 2,000 students have taken my classes and left knowing how to write simple programs that work. Some learned how to do only a little and others gained incredible skill over the course of just a few years.
I have plenty of students who are exceptional but most of my students are regular kids with no experience and no particular aptitude for programming. This book is written for regular people like them.
Most programming books and tutorials online are written by people with great natural ability and very little experience with real beginners. Their books often cover far too much material far too quickly and overestimate what true beginners can understand.
If you have a lot of experience or extremely high aptitude, you can learn to code from almost any source. I sometimes read comments like “I taught my 9-year-old daughter to code, and she made her first Android app six weeks later!” If you are the child prodigy, this book is not written for you.
I have also come to believe that there is no substitute for writing lots of small programs. So that’s what you will do in this book. You will type in small programs and run them.
“The best way to learn is to do.” – P.R. Halmos
“Learn Object-Oriented Java the Hard Way” is ©2015–2016 Graham Mitchell