Learning Java Through Games

Learning Java Through Games teaches students how to use the different features of the Java language as well as how to program. Suitable for self-study or as part of a two-course introduction to programming, the book covers as much material as possible from the latest Java standard while requiring no previous programming experience.

Taking an application-motivated approach, the text presents an abundance of games. Students must read through the whole chapter to understand all the features that are needed to implement the game. Most chapters start with a description of a game and then introduce different Java constructs for implementing the features of the game on need-to-use bases.

The text teaches students not only how to write code that works but also how to follow good software practices. All sample programs in the text strive to achieve low cohesion and high coupling―the hallmarks of well-designed code. Many programs are refactored multiple times to achieve code that is easy to understand, reuse, and maintain.

The first part of the book covers basic programming techniques, such as conditional statements, loops, methods, arrays, and classes. The second part focuses on more advanced topics, including class inheritance, recursions, sorting algorithms, GUI programming, exception handling, files, and applets.

Lubomir Stanchev is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. He received a Ph.D. from the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. He has taught introductory programming courses and software engineering courses about 15 times in the past eight years. He has published more than five journal articles and more than 20 conference proceedings in the area of computer science. He has been writing software code for over 30 years and has worked as a software developer in four different companies.