Buy this book at Amazon.com The strange history of this book In
January 1999 I was preparing to teach an introductory
programming class in Java. I had taught it three times and I was
getting frustrated. The failure rate in the class was too high
and, even for students who succeeded, the overall level of
achievement was too low. One of the problems I saw was the
books. They were too big, with too much unnecessary detail about
Java, and not enough high-level guidance about how to program.
And they all suffered from the trap door effect: they would
start out easy, proceed gradually, and then somewhere around
Chapter 5 the bottom would fall out. The students would get too
much new material, too fast, and I would spend the rest of the
semester picking up the pieces. Two weeks before the first day
of classes, I decided to write my My goals were: - Keep it
short. It is better for students to read 10 pages than not read
50 pages. - Be careful with vocabulary. I tried to minimize the
jargon and define each term at fir