Java 6 Course

Welcome to the VTC course on Java 6 programming. This tutorial assumes that you already know how to write programs in Java and how that doesn't mean that you need to be some kind of super-Java programmer. It only means that this course is not about Java basics. You only need to know how to compile and run simple Java programs. This course is here to show you how to use some of the newer things in the language. My name is Arthur Griffith and I've spent several years as a programmer. I turned into a writer and a teacher of computer programming. I've written several books, some of them on Java programming. Now, this course is filled with examples. These are all small programs, each one written to demonstrate just one thing. By the way, all the code that I'll be showing you compiles and runs and is available to you along with this course. Now, to keep the display of source codes simple, you'll notice that I use a simple text editor. Now, I'm not trying to sell you on the idea of using any particular editor. You can use any editor or any integrated development environment you prefer. They all do the same things. It doesn't matter which one you use. The Java language is the same. The course starts out with a bit of a review of things that you may not use very often. Things like abstract classes, annotations, default instructors and so on and then goes on into an overview of Swing. Swing is a huge subject and can take up the whole tutorial, but I will show you just enough of it so you'll be able to write applications. You'll learn enough of the basics of Swing to be able to easily pick up any other parts of it you may need. There's a lot of it, but it all works pretty much the same. I'll be showing you some of the user interface items that can be used to add professional touches to your software. You'll be able to add toolbars and those little pop-up tool tips to your application. Well, here's something slick you can do now. I'll show you how you can dynamically change the look and feel of your application. Generics really came about in Java 5, but they were expanded a bit in Java 6. At any rate, I'm going to explain them as if they were brand new because not everybody's used them. Java is big on collections now. The collections are objects that can hold other objects for you. They have the power of organizing things in ways so you can get them back the way you'd like to have them. The lang and util packages have some things in them that you may not be aware of. I'll show you what I mean. And there are some special things that you need to be aware of. Things like timers and sound and the keyboard and internationalization and there are some new IO classes that you may not have even heard of. And I'll wrap it all up with some gotchas. There are a few things in Java today that can sneak up on you if you're not careful. I'm certain I don't know about all of them, but I'll show you a few that I do know about.  

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