How to Think Like a Programmer is a bright, accessible, fun read describing the mindset and mental methods of programmers. Anticipating the problems that students have through the character of Brian the Bewildered Wildebeest, the slower pace required for this approach is made interesting and engaging by hand-drawn sketches, frequent (paper-based) activities and the everyday tasks (e.g. coffee making) used as a basis of worked examples. How to Think Like a Programmer provides a fun and accessible way to learn the mental models needed to approach computational programmable problems.

Table of Contents

PART ONE: Creating and Using Java Classes 1. Introduction 2. Creating Classes 3. Developing Class Methods PART TWO: Methods and Statements 4. Input and Formatting Class Methods 5. Selection 6. Repetition PART THREE: Reference and Collection Datatypes 7. Strings and Characters 8. Collections: Arrays PART FOUR: Creating Swing-Based GUIs 9. Visual Programming Basics 10. Additional Class Capabilities PART FIVE: Additional Programming Topics 11. Additional Class Capabilities 12. Files 13. Collections: List Creating and Maintenance 14. Additional Capabilities APPENDICES Appendix A: Operator Precedence Table Appendix B: Unicode Character Set Appendix C: Compiliing and Running a Java Program Appendix D: Obtaining Locales