My Second and Third Java Assignments

Posted on May 24, 2017 by Administrator

It is been exactly two weeks since I began my java journey with my personal tutor Sunil Kumar. Every week on Thursday and Friday together with other students who like me are learning Java we connect with Sunil via Google Hangouts in Harare and he  teaches us the Java Programming language. I started Techworld Code School to get as many people as I could to join in the learning with the hope that we can have as many software developers as we can in Zimbabwe to help solve our problems through software applications.

You can read about my journey so far here. Those without internet access connect at Techword Internet Cafe. 

My second assignment basically involved me using what we had been taught in the previous lesson and I am excited to share with you my thought process as I tackled the assignment. I used operators, if and else statement and the now familiar print statements to arrive at my solution which had a little over 66 lines of code. So you learn to code certain things sort of just flow like the System.out.println();. Netbeans has been very helpful in helping to see what does what and where I misuse something its quickly to highlight errors. The beauty about error messages is that they send you online to do some research and that’s how we learn isn’t.

I am a little surprised how this happened, how after only two weeks of learning to code Java I can now write a program that does what it is supposed to. There is a good feeling that you get when the program goes past a certain stage and this is what has kept me wanting to complete the program. It hasn’t been easy but I think my background also helps. I have been able to attack the problem in all my assignments and have avoided copying and pasting code. (Avoid this at all costs! there is always a big temptation to do this) If you must copy something type into the IDE. What I like about learning this way is I have been experimenting and finding that things just sort of fall in place if you select the right tools for the job.

Take for instance the If – Else statement and relational operators. My code may not be perfect but its working and I have also learnt along the way that before code can work it will be broken and you slowly solve one problem at a time until you have some “Aha” moments where you just discover what should be where. Cheat sheets like this one also help you to appreciate the structure and how you should construct and use stuff in Java

It can be frustrating at first but I am committed to learning at all costs. What I am happy about so far is you start blank but by the end of each assignment you discover you have accumulated some knowledge and can see what does what in all the lines of code.

What I like about java is as I write the code it is like I am speaking in plain English If number1 is Greater than 10 or less than 1 print try again for example. Yes Java has its way of then expecting me to write this in the way it understands but it helps that I can think this way and find ways of then writing the code. This is why I am encouraging anyone who thinks learning to code is impossible to join Techworld Code School.

The third assignment involved me using familar jargon, interest rate calculation. It involved basic multiplication, division and addition. At first i thought it was going to be very hard until i reliased that all i needed to do was to find the formula for simple interest calculation. I love solving problems and i always go out of my way to find the best way out of a situation.  

I agree coding can be hard but it helps to read widely. I have been reading books and blogs that are related to computer science and how to think like a software developer. Without these I would not be able to know the importance of how to attack my assignment. You too can benefit from my learning process. I share all the resources i am using. To find out more about some of the stuff I have been reading follow this link and like the page or join Techworld Code School.