What Did You Like or Not Like?

Dude, I got one thing to say…Give us More!

Just Finished AbsoluteBeginner (and I am one).  Well Done!   Some of the best instruction I have ever encountered.

Went exploring the Eclipse web sight and found this forum - read every post in this thread.

Some suggestions  (and/or help for other readers of this forum):

1.  To help those who do not know to use the html file as the starting point a Read-me-first file in the Lesson 2 folder might be in order.  I am suggesting that this ReadMe be in the Lesson 2 folder because I (like many?) ran lesson 1 from the web page and never downloaded the folder.  What I was really looking for though was a page that linked to all of the lessons.  (Was such a thing actually in the Lesson 1 folder?)

2. I am using Eclipse on the MacOS and found some differences between what was presented in the tutorial and how my version behaved.  The most obvious one was the behavior of the File menu.  When the tutorial first directed me to open a new JUnitTest file the tutorial showed this option listed directly under the File:New menu.  I had to dig deeply in the hierarchy to find it.  (New:other:java:JUnit:jJUnitTestCase).   Similarly for the JUnitTestSuite.  Interestingly enough after several sessions JUnitTestCase was added to the File:New list.     Another difference is that when starting a class definition the suggested options pop up automatically with out any key press after about a 1 second delay.  Perhaps a ReadMe for MacOS users is needed if there are other differences.

3. I noted somewhere in reading the forum a comment that the shortcut keys could not be reassigned in Eclipse.  In the Mac version at least they can be.  Preferences:General:Keys.  I have ctrl-space assigned to a function in the OS, so I was able to reassign the Eclipse function to option-space.

4. After completing AbsolueBeginner I went looking for another source for learning to program in Java.  What I found is almost as good as your tutorials.  A FREE on-line book (published it is 700 pages long).  That makes frequent reference to Eclipse.  Here is the link.
<a href="http://math.hws.edu/javanotes/" target="_blank">JavaNotes 5.1</a>   By the way this text introduces IO and GUI very early for those who want to get interactive right away.

In reading through the forum I found references to other tutorials you were planning on writing (other than persistence, debug, and workbench). Did you produce them?  If so where can they be found?

One last comment - I really wanted to be able to download the entire lesson package at once instead of having to do it one lesson at a time.

Thanx again for the tutorials.

Hi There,
Jst joined in…
I need some help in downloading the tutorials as im using mac n im unable to the link which i downloaded on my macintosh…
Please suggest solution for this..
thanks.

That was rly great!! Just didne like some little things on programs:

your use new XStream(new DomDriver()); constructor in the 2 methods  convertToXml and convertFromXml methods
is redundant you can just use
static XStream xstream = new XStream(new DomDriver()); at MyUtilities class.

the @blabla things… completely unundestandeble its like macros or what?

I too have the same problem and cannot find any surefire answers.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.  LOVE the tutorials and anxious to get to the next step.

Ryan

Mark,

Just completed the debugger tutorial.  Wow, this has to be the best way to experience a tutorial.  Being able to move the slider bar back and forth and review an explanation again or see a procedure again is very nice.  Also, great quality on the video-no trouble reading the screen, unlike most YouTube videos containing screen captures.  Audio was also excellent quality, with good annunciation and just the right speed to follow along.  Seeing the debugger in action is the perfect way for me to learn, and I learned so much.  All this, and it's provided for free to the community.  Thank you for your excellent work!

Thanks you so much for spending the time and effort on putting these tutorials together. I was mostly looking for an Eclipse tutorial, the material about Java and unit testing was redundant for me. I still enjoyed the "Total Beginners", time well spent.

  Adding "Workbench" to my queue, only noticed it while trying to find a place to give feedback.

Erik

I just finished all courses… It is was realy great. :)

I have finished the Beginner course and just starting the next one. The Java content is great. Really great. I have poked at Java a couple of times over the years, but not really 'got' it. This is really helping, and having an Android phone is providing motivation. Thank you very much.
The intro music, on the other hand, for that I do not thank you. :-)

I just finished taking the tree tutorial.
Just what I needed to get confident starting using Eclipse and Java.
Very well presented and lessons were just right for me.
Thanks a lot!
Juan

Thanks for these tutorials - i added my feedback on my blog here: http://wp.me/p1l7gu-1M

Thanks for the kind words. Glad the tutorials are helpful for you. Good luck with Android! Mark

Thanks much!! :)

Hi Mark,

After going through all three tutorials, I was wondering if there was any way to show a little appreciation for all the hard work that has gone into it. Well apparently this is the place to be :-).

I'd like to thank you for some great, no… excellent tutorials on the combined topics of Eclipse and Java! Being primarily a procedural programmer, I'm quite new to the OO programming world. On top of that, Eclipse can be quite intimidating at first. Using both your tutorials, and the (e)book refered to before ('Introduction to Programming Using Java, Fifth Edition' by Davd J. Eck http://math.hws.edu/javanotes/), I became quite comfortable with both Java and Eclipse now.

For people like me, that are already comfortable programming in other languages/environments, the tutorials are a bit 'slow' of course. However, that didn't annoy me at all; it allowed me to go through each lesson completely, focusing on the Java/Eclipse specifics, before switching back to Eclipse to try a few things.

Last but not least, I'm very happy to have been introduced to the XStream library. For the project I'm working on, I needed a close relationship between XML-files and Java Objects. I've been looking at several solutions, but none of them were so straightforward and simple as XStream. I'll be using this one in my project for sure!

Kind regards,
Koos

I am very pleased that you have found the tutorials helpful. Good luck with your Java work. Mark

Hi Mark,.. I've just finished the Total Beginner tutorials, it was Great!. Though, I think, that it is still required at least a superficial knowledge about the concepts of programming, algorithm and OOP, to get through the videos easily. I'm now learning Data Structures with Pascal, beginning C and OOP concepts with Delphi at 2nd year of College, so I know the very basics stuff of programming. hmm, wait.., thinking of it.. the ones who are searching for Java tutorials might already know something about programming, silly me .. haha…

oh, and there's my ..main point, what I like the most from the videos is that, you didn't made a very detailed explanations about the types, identifiers, sub-programs, pointers.. etc..etc..etc.. which saved a lot of time .. xD

well, anyways, Thank you very much for the great and free ^^ tutorials.

XiaoS! from South America… getting ready for the second tutorial.. >.<

Hello Mr. Dexter

I am a computer instructor since early 80´s, and let me tell you this is one of the best tutorials ever. I think its great value is not only the fact of been able to learn a lot of new things, but the methodology is great.

Thanks a lot for teaching me how to teach.

Jorge

Pardon me sir
i've send the private message to you

btw thanks a lot sir,
how a great eclipse java tutorial ever

i've just finished my totalbeginner lesson;
Pardon me,, my question sir..
on the beginning of your 16's tutorial ..
you said "Writing a graphical use interface is beyond the scope of this tutorial. "
actually i came from netbeans background; it has simple ui design AFAIK

may i know the best tutorial for the Writing a gui with eclipse?
Please send me the link,

thanks in advance

Hi Mark,

Brilliant tutorials. Thank you.

I'm not sure I understand the utilitiesTest code in lesson 3. I put the code generating the File variable testFile into ScrapBook to explore it.

Even before testFile.delete(), the code returns as below i.e. that the testFile does not exist.
Where am i going wrong here?

java.io.File testFile = new java.io.File("testsavetostring.txt");
testFile.exists();
(boolean) false

Thanks for the really fantastic tutorials.

Addendum to previous post (2011-05-22 11:59:50 GMT)

Apologies, I misunderstood what File testFile = new File("testsavetostring.txt"); is doing.

For the benefit of others that might do the same …

This line of code creates the handle 'testFile'  that refers to the specified file. It does not CREATE the file, but merely points to it (if it exists).

Which nicely explains my result above

java.io.File testFile = new java.io.File("testsavetostring.txt"); testFile.exists(); (boolean) false

The handle can then be used to delete the file if it does exist.

After which - as Mark's original code shows - it doesn't exist.

phew!

Very good work and thank you for making these.

The only problem I ran into was trying to find a way to play SWF files on my Ubuntu machine, but that was resolved after some searching.

Wow!  Your tutorial ranks as among the best I've ever encountered.  Still good after all these years.  I used it to get started with Eclipse Helios.  

well sir,
  i think the tutorials are very good for beginners and for revising…..

once again thanks for uploading them.

ashishkumar haldar

From EdysPad

Eclipse and Java for Total Beginners
i down loaded totalbeginnerlesson 1 to 6
and i installed adobe flash player..

after i installed the player

i still could not play the lessons
when i open up part 1 it was all black
and said i needed to install adobe flash player
which i all ready did i have it installed.

so why can't i watch all the parts from 1 to 6
i can not

i will not download the rest untell someone
can help me with this

https://sourceforge.net/projects/eclipsetutorial/files/1.%20Total%20Beginners/Version%201.0/

edyspad@roadrunner.com

Hey-really good tutorial. I'm new to programming, but the whole series was easy to follow and a lot more helpful than the "Hello World" tutorial on the Oracle site. Anyway, the only problem I had was that JUnit apparently works differently in the new versions of Eclipse. You either have to right-click the class page itself to create a new JUnit test case or you have to click "Browse" in the test case setup page to select "org.totalbeginner.tutorial.Person" for the class being tested. You can't just type in "Person"-it won't compile. Anyway, now I have a solid foundation of the basics in Java, Eclipse and object-oriented programming. Another good tutorial I'd recommend to beginners is "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist," which is a Python tutorial but really fun to learn with if you like math and logic.

http://openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english2e/index.html

Java seems more useful to me than Python, but I don't know that much about programming.