langbein.org: Labs

Contents

Handouts

Worksheet 1 (with hints)
Worksheet 2 (with hints)
Worksheet 3 (with hints)
Worksheet 4 (with hints)
Worksheet 5 (with hints)
Worksheet 6 (with hints)
Worksheet 7 (with hints)

Resrouces

Web pages for recommended books with code examples, etc.

Programming Environment

The classes for these labs are held in the Linux labs. You may in general use any programming environment and hardware platform you like (as long as it works with the Java SE 6 platform). For the exercises it is sufficient to use a text editor and a terminal. Complex and heavy IDEs are not required, and will probably just make things more difficult. My suggestion would be to use kate as editor, but you are free to use another editor. For more information see the following links.

For general documentation see the school documentation server, and in particular the introductory notes 201 on UNIX/Linux shell commands, 302 on Gnome, 320 on the Gnome Terminal Emulator.
Note, especially nautilus (Gnome's file manager) may not be ideal to use. On a terminal you can try mc (midnight commander) or try the graphical file manager thunar or krusader.
As text editor I'd recommend to use Kate or GNU Emacs or NEdit
If you wish to use an IDE you can try Eclipse or NetBeans, but they are rather heavy for the types of program you have to develop. You may want to consider Anjuta or BlueJ.
But note that if you use an IDE you may tie your work to that particular IDE and become dependent on it; have to learn how to use the IDE; have to work with a rather heavy-weight, resource hungry program; limit the actual knowledge you acquire about Java as the IDE does it for you; may lock yourself into a platform as the IDE may not be supported by all platforms that support Java (and you may also be locked into Java as the IDE does not provide support for other languages); and you are ultimately still left with a tool that does not provide all the functionality you need. Hence the suggestion to use a good, simple text editor and a terminal to bring in the tools for compiling, documenting, version control, debugging, etc.