I need some Java-for-dummies help

Factual Questions
1

I’m not sure if this is the right place for this, so please feel free to move it if it should go somewhere else.

I’m a technical writer for a large company, and one of the things I need to do this quarter is to help introduce our group to Java (we usually write doc for implementers and end users; we’re not engineers and none of us know programming languages).

I thought that a good way to do this was to find a simple Java applet/program that does something interesting (so we’re talking a bit more complex than “Hello World,” here) and annotate the source code to show what each piece does, while explaining some of the terminology and syntax. Ideally, I’d like to be able to run the program either before or after explaining it, to show the group what it does in action.

Keeping in mind that I’m an utter Java newbie and thus would like to keep this simple, can anyone suggest a good place for me to look or help me figure out a good way to do this? I’d prefer not to have to buy a book if I can find something online, but for the right book I’d be willing to do it.

My deadline for presenting it to the group is the end of this month.

Thanks in advance!

2

Are these too complicated for your needs? They come with the full source. The Matrix style scrolling binary text is the simplest of the lot.

Those applets helped me to learn Java.

3

If you’re interested in actually learning along the way, then this is usually a great starting point:

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/

The site layout sucks, but once you get into the trails, they’re fairly readable and helpful, and you can download and play with source code for all the examples.

4

Thanks! I appreciate your suggestions, and I’ll check them out.

I was poking around the web a little bit and found this, which, given the level of detail I’m aiming for (not high), might be just the thing. But I’ll definitely check out the other suggestions as well. Maybe I can cobble something together from various sources. :slight_smile:

5

I second the Java tutorials, they’re very good. But you’re presenting to your documentation group? Do they need some background of what Java is, why it’s good, what does it offer that other programming languages don’t, etc.? I’m not sure what your presentation is supposed to cover, but I just thought I’d raise the question: do you want to concentrate on showing them the code or giving some other kind of exposition on the features of Java? (Of course, you can do both.)

6

Also here is another nice web page with some simple Applet examples with
source code. Source code can be display in any text editor (WordPad works nicely).

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/javanut/examples/

You probably have Java Runtime Environment - JRE (Sun’s Java runtime environment) or Java Virtual Machine- JVM (Microsoft’s Java runtime environment - comes with OS) on your computer as you’ve probably come across applets on the web and have been able to run/see them. But if you need … here are links to current ones.

Sun’s JRE
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html

Microsoft’s JVM for XP
http://www.mvps.org/marksxp/WindowsXP/java.php

Don’t know if you plan on playing with any code … but if you do you would need Sun’s Java SDK (Software Development Kit) available at above Sun link. You could download it with NetBeans, Sun’s Java Compiler. Or, that compiler is high end, you could search the web for a free simple Java compiler.

This is a nice one …
http://www.jcreator.com/
And because I’m proud of it visit …
http://members.aol.com/wigender/

The E-mail address is old and I don’t use that one any more. But feel free
to download it the zip. There is a ReadMe file in it and again the Java
souce code displays nicely if you open it in WordPad. It’s problaby a bit more
complicated then your looking for.