Second Edition

Image of 2nd edition coverThe second edition had the same overall philosophy and purpose as the first. It was published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 28th February 2000; paper 1020pp, ISBN 0 471 60696 0.

This edition has significant changes to the first edition: Part 1 was changed significantly and there was general rearrangements of material and updating – all guided by experience by ourselves and others of using the book as an integral part of teachng. Also, of course, Java itself had evolved and so updating was important, taking into account the release of the Java 2 Platform: the second edition was tested using J2SE v1.3

As with the first edition, use of the second edition by us brought learning, and use by others gave us strong feedback. It was becoming clear that the idea of a book to cover two courses was losing favour – not least because the book was big and heavy! All feedback indicated that evolving the book to be a textbook aimed squarely at a first course in programming was what was required: educators and students liked our approach to the first phase of learning programming but were not using the more advanced material.

Changes to the Java Platform have also been significant: Java SE 5.0 `Tiger' introduced generics and annotations (and other things). This has led to a really radical change to the book, particularly regarding the way in which the use of data structures are introduced.

As well as the programming technology changes, the introduction of agile methods widely into the practice of programming has fundamentally changed the way in which people program and so has changed the curriculum for a first course in programming. In particular, we moved to using test-driven development (TDD) as a fundamental core philosophy of our teaching and so the book needed to reflect this. Not only does TDD for improve professional programmers productivity and decrease bugs count, it provides an excellent framework for people learning programming.