Outline of resources to learn Java

Couple weeks ago during our Women Who Code leadership meeting, one of our organizers  volunteered to run a meetup for people who want to learn Java and I committed on helping her by providing an outline of topics and resources useful to prepare for this event.  

Here is the outline for the java curriculum that I sent her, I also included some links for resources where you can reference the topics. I hope this is helpful for anyone who is trying to learn Java (please read below if you are curious to know about my relationship with Java) 

• Basics – Programming 
• 1. Variable and types: Although Java is object oriented, not all types are objects. It is built on top of basic variable types called primitives.
  2. Conditionals
  3. Arrays
  4. Loops
  5. Functions
  6. Objects
  7. Compiling and Running with Arguments
• Java focus: 
• • What is java and how it works (talk about what is Java virtual machine and the java development kit)
  • Inheritance 
  • Try and Catch
  • Abstract classes
  • Interfaces
  • Using Generics
  • Collections
  • Wrappers and Autoboxing
  • Exceptions
  • Generic Types
  • IO Streams
• From book HeadFirst
• 1. Chapter 1, Breaking the Surface
  2. Chapter 2, A Trip to Objectville
  3. Chapter 3, Know Your Variables
  4. Chapter 4, How Objects Behave
  5. Chapter 5, Extra-Strength Methods
  6. Chapter 6, Using the Java Library
  7. Chapter 7, Better Living in Objectville
  8. Chapter 8, Serious Polymorphism
  9. Chapter 9, Life and Death of an Object
  10. Chapter 10, Numbers Matter
  11. Chapter 11, Risky Behavior
  12. Chapter 12, A Very Graphic Story
  13. Chapter 13, Work on Your Swing
  14. Chapter 14, Saving Objects
  15. Chapter 15, Make a Connection
  16. Chapter 16, Data Structures
  17. Chapter 18, Distributed Computing
• Resources:
• https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/nutsandbolts/index.html
• http://www.tutorialspoint.com/java/
• https://www.udemy.com/java-tutorial/
  
• http://www.learnjavaonline.org/en/Variables_and_Types
• http://www.headfirstlabs.com/books/hfjava/

How I got into Java:

When I got a job in Thoughtworks, I was required to prepare for the upcoming training in Java.  To be honest, it was hard to switch from Ruby on Rails and its magic to Java, and I am still having some hard time sometimes but its teaching a lot specially its helping me to understand better what I am doing and how things are connected.  

During the training, I had to deal with Java and also Spring MVC which is a framework with Model-View-Controller kind of similar to Rails but with a lot more confirmation that has to be done.  

“The Spring web MVC framework provides model-view-controller architecture and ready components that can be used to develop flexible and loosely coupled web applications. The MVC pattern results in separating the different aspects of the application (input logic, business logic, and UI logic), while providing a loose coupling between these elements"