Introduction to Programming in Java: An Interdisciplinary Approach

This book is good for a one-semester course, but note that it is the first 4 chapters of another book written by these authors, Computer Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach, which has another 3 chapters at same price and hardcover.

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I am pretty old system software engineer in Silicon Valley. I don't have working experience with Java, but mastery skill with C language and I am OK with C++ and Python. I bought the first edition of this book in 2017 and this Summer I started to use this book to tutor my daughter which is incoming freshman in Electrical Engineering in UC Davis. She had one year AP Computer Science Course with Java in high school and got 5 in her AP exam.I chose to buy this book because I have the Algorithm in C++ book from the same author which is excellent book. After went thru a few chapters in this book, I started to realize I choose a good book to tutor my daughter since this is the book for serious software engineering. A very good amount of examples and excises have something to do with natural science, ex. Math and Physics. A common misconception nowadays is that the programming almost doesn't need math or physics foundation, but this book shows how important the natural science can help student becoming a good programmer.

This book is clearly tailored for somewhat intense Computer Science Undergrad Program's first year course. I say that because it's not exactly the quickest path to learning your first language; it's more focused on big computer science concepts as it is on the Java language itself. If someone is completely new to programming it might be a bit overwhelming to not be given solid practice with a language before talking about complex subjects like recursive implementation of sorting and searching algorithms and their Time Complexity measurements as this book does.I have my reservations about the currently accepted choice of Java as the first "teaching language" in most universities but here is where the book shines: it does a great job of framing Java within the world of other languages. Lower level features not in Java like pointers are talked about. The book works with a non-standard library called stdlib which emulates C's printf as well as some providing some really nice classes for creating graphical elements, bridging the gap to higher level languages like Javascript and providing the satisfaction of some real feedback. I believe this library is authored at Princeton University, where the book is used.If you are a self-learner looking to learn your first language I wouldn't really recommend this book unless you're a very fast learner or you supplement it with some real Java language learning and practice. The latter might even be my recommendation if you are using this text book in college and don't already have some programming experience.

I am using this book to self-study Java, and it is truly excellent. There is a plethora of practice problems at the end of each sub-chapter that are quite interesting, and ultimately reinforce the material. I believe this book is superior to other introductory java books (and some other introductory programming books for that matter), because of the sheer number of practice problems without answers (some are on the book's website). Throughout my academic career, I've discovered that being able to answer a question on your own or make a valiant effort on your own is much more educationally valuable than having the answer shown to you. Furthermore, this book does not advocate a particular IDE, and encourages the user to manually compile and run the programs, which I think is completely necessary for a java programmer to understand.This book is math-centric, and those without a solid math foundation (introductory statistics/probability/linag/calculus) may feel lost in some examples or exercises.In all, this book provides a great java and programming foundation for one to move onto more advanced topics.