Hello Authors once again.
Trying to encourage discussion to define a possible books route.
Now we are in 2017. Since 1995 it seems there were lots of books released about the
Java Object Oriented language.
Universities use them for programming courses, people buy with an intention to learn program.
Now, looking to most of the beginners books I've had contact with, it seems a lot of them are a reference style, "a lot" in my experience appear to be almost all (except Head First Java by Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates; and few of Cay S. Horstmann's):
General idea of all those books follows the lines:
What are primitive types
What are conditional operators
What is if statement
What is for loop
what is while loop
So on and on and on, we have all that information in Oracle Java Tutorials
here, which is kind of
default thing. When somebody releases an API, they provide documentation. Java has its own documentation, JLS and Tutorials.
Where I'm leaning, that most of the books just duplicating the knowledge which is provided already in a default language package without providing some significant extra's.
My first question is, what is the motivation behind that, to release yet another book of this kind? Don't take this as an attack, just trying to raise a healthy discussion
According to the text at the end of book, this book is meant to be for students, most likely for future programmers.
Looking to the content of the book, I get an impression that there is little about Java as about Object Oriented language, which unfortunately I had to pick up quite late too, and it started here in this forum actually, rather than in my teaching institution or from the books I have been introduced there.
Not a secret, that lots of community members here are students, which coming with lots of different questions. What we perceive here being and reading questions on daily basis, that students got overflowed with an amount of content (which partially comes from universities and books suggested to use there) which seem to be having little to nothing related with Object Oriented programming.
Now, few members of the Ranch trying to roll this up and change that, involving academia and in general spreading object oriented programming ideas (which are currently seem to be separated from Java as a language) to students.
Second question, don't you think, that book would be way more successful if it would follow those lines rather than reference book's?
Right at the beginning one is suggested to write HelloWorld in a main method and explained all details what is happening. I'd think that book would get way more credits (at least from few moderators) if the HelloWorld program's example would start as (we have our own tutorial
MainIsAPain) :
Honestly, lots of people getting sick of seeing over and over again the same things again from the 2nd-3rd year students writing all programs in
main() method. I believe that is partial influence of excessive amount of books which pushing that idea to lots of our heads.
Last question. Do you think you would be up in a future on releasing a book about Java as about truly object oriented language, where most of the stuff would be discussed about object orientation, and to lookup for existing data types there would be a reference to Oracle's tutorial?