There are 12 units of study

Introduction and Java Review

Now that you've done some Java programming, you may be wondering, "What's next?" In this first lesson, you'll get a taste of what you'll learn before the course is over. To make sure everyone is on the same page, we'll do a short review of the Java skills you should already have—this will get your wheels turning if you haven't worked with Java in a while! You'll also find out about a few different development environments you can use to create and run your own Java programs.

Arrays, Loops, and Using Multple Classes

The array is one of the most commonly used data structures in any programming language. In this lesson, we'll go over how arrays work, including their internal structure. You'll find out how to create arrays, how to store and access data in them, and how to process them efficiently using loops. Along the way, you'll also learn the difference between a class that's a complete program and one that isn't. You'll see how to write classes that use other classes in their processing, which is helpful when you're working with a lot of information.

File Input and Output

Computers can do an incredible amount of work, but it's often all for nothing if you can't save the results after the program finishes. That's where data files come into play. Today's lesson shows you how to read and write computer data files using Java. This process takes place many times every day in all kinds of programs, so it's a very useful and important one to understand.

Inheritance and Class Hierarchies

Have you ever wondered exactly what the big deal is about object-oriented programming (OOP)? Why does is matter whether a language is object-oriented or not? In this lesson, we'll look at exactly what object orientation means to Java through the topic of inheritance. One of the primary features of an OOP language is how its classes inherit features from other classes in the class hierarchy. You'll find out how Java's class hierarchy is organized, and you'll learn how to use the different types of classes (interfaces, abstract classes, and concrete classes) to your advantage.

Stand-Alone GUI Applications

We'll explore Java's GUI tools in today's lesson. Just about every program we use on computers today has a graphical user interface, or GUI. That just means the program appears in a window with menus, icons, buttons, and so on. Java has hundreds of GUI tools we can use to build our own applications to run in any windowed operating system that supports Java (Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, among others). You'll learn how to set up a stand-alone application using Java's GUI tools, including labels, buttons, dialogs, and more.

Layouts and Multiple GUI Components

Today you'll continue learning about Java's GUI capabilities. You'll explore several ways that Java can organize multiple GUI components in a window, and you'll find out how to split windows into smaller areas called panels, which you can organize in different ways. You'll see how to set up Java's scroll bars in a window or part of a window so that users can scroll up, down, left, and right through the display.

GUI Menus

What do almost all modern-day programs have in common? They have menus. Menus are probably the best-known and most widely used GUI programming feature. In this lesson, you'll learn how to create menus using Java's menu bar, menu, and menu item components. You'll be able to create as many menus in an application as you need, each with all the menu items and submenus necessary to perform the task you're programming.

A Working GUI Application: Part 1

By this time, you'll have spent three lessons learning about different Java GUI programming techniques and tools. Today, you'll learn how to put the pieces together into a complete, reasonably complex Java application. You'll see how to combine menu options, graphics, check boxes, radio buttons, and text entry fields into a windowed program that can actually perform a useful task: It allows someone to order a pizza! (How much more useful can it get?)

A Working GUI Application: Part 2

Today, we'll take what we started in Lesson 8, where you learned how to design and build a GUI interface to order a pizza, and we'll make it functional. You already have all the GUI components displayed nicely in the window, so now you'll learn how to make your program gather all the data from the different components in the window, and then put that information together into a useful pizza order. (I'm afraid it won't actually deliver the pizza, though.) You'll get an idea of what you can create with Java's GUI capabilities.

Java Collections: Part 1

Most programmers don't write computer programs to deal with individual data items. Usually, they write programs to deal with groups of items. In this lesson, you'll learn all about Java's collection classes, a group of data structures designed to work with many items at once. You'll discover the difference between lists, queues, sets, maps, and other types of collections. We'll explore how to work with a list to load a group of items from a file into a list, and how to display items from the list in a GUI window. Along the way, you'll learn another useful technique in GUI programming: how to use Java's file chooser dialog to select a file to open and process.

Java Collections: Part 2

To explore more of Java's collections, today we'll continue working on the program we began in Lesson 10. You'll find out how to navigate through a list (forward and backward), displaying each list item as you go. You'll also see how to set up a window with multiple display formats, and switch between them by clicking tabs that describe the different views. You'll also learn how to create items that Java can compare, even if Java doesn't know the details of what is in the items. You'll use that capability to build a list and sort its items in a specified sequence. That's a very useful and important capability when you're dealing with large numbers of items.

Java Collections: Part 3

In our last lesson, we'll delve even deeper into the topic of collections. (You can see that it's a large and important subject!) You'll find out how to use maps, which are Java collections that let you store and retrieve data items quickly based on a unique data element of each item (its key). Think of looking up a telephone number in a large telephone book like New York City's. Finding a single number would be impossible if the data weren't properly organized. We'll see how to use the same type of search to quickly find any data item we need in a collection. And while we're doing that, you'll also learn a bit more about Java's other features, including Java's wrapper class, which is one more important data feature of the Java language that you'll use quite often. By the end of this lesson, you'll be amazed at what you're able to do with Java!

There are 12 units of study

 Getting Started

In this first lesson, you'll learn whom this class is for and what it's all about. We'll get hands-on right away, creating a folder and adjusting some settings in your operating system and editor so you're ready to start creating a website. We'll discuss the basics of what HTML5 and CSS3 are all about, as well as why you'll want to learn to use them. And finally, you'll learn to save time by creating an HTML5 page template that you can use as the starting point for each new page you create in this course and later on your own.

Styling Your Website

Today, you'll grow to appreciate the beauty and practicality of using CSS to style your entire website. You'll discover how CSS lets you create design elements that give your site a consistent look, feel, and unique identity. And if you ever decide to change something in your styling, you won't have to go digging through all the pages individually to make changes. You just change your style sheet in one place, and all the pages in the site update instantly and automatically.

Styling Backgrounds

Background colors, photos, textures, patterns, and gradients can really add some pizzazz to your website. In today's lesson, you'll learn to do them all, and you'll have a lot of fun doing so.

Borders, Corners, and Shadows

In today's lesson, you'll learn how to add some real professional polish to your design with borders, rounded corners, and drop shadows. And better yet, they're easy to do, thanks to some simple CSS properties.

Styling Text

Today, you'll learn about the many ways you can style your text with CSS, including fonts, text shadows, and more. We'll start with an overview of the primary tags for text markup in HTML. Then we'll look at the many properties CSS offers for making your text look great!

Spice It Up With Pictures

Pictures add a lot of visual interest to any website, and in today's lesson, you'll learn all about using pictures in your site. We'll start with an overview of the types of pictures you can use, and we'll go over how to insert them using HTML tags. Then we'll talk about ways you can float, position, and size pictures using CSS

Mastering Style Classes and Link Styles

In today's lesson, you'll learn about style classes and links. Style classes are a great tool for defining styles that you can use freely wherever you want throughout your site. They can be a real boon to your creativity and a real time-saver for managing your styles. You'll also learn about pseudo-classes, which are a special type of class for styling links and mouse-over effects. And as an added bonus, you'll learn some advanced techniques for links including opening pages in a new window, using jump links within a page, adding tooltips to your links, using pictures as links, and creating email links.

Fun With Sound and Video

Nothing brings a site to life better than sound and video. In today's lesson, you'll learn all the newest and most modern techniques for playing sounds and showing videos on your site. You'll learn the secrets of embedding YouTube videos on your pages so you don't have to upload video files to your own site. And you'll learn about all the modern file formats and HTML5 tags for embedding sound and music into your pages without using YouTube or any other site.

Styling Tables

HTML tables are the perfect tool for displaying information in rows and columns, like tables you see in print. In today's lesson, you'll learn techniques for styling tables with traditional CSS, as well as brand new CSS3 techniques that really make tables shine with minimal coding!

Mastering the CSS Box Model

Getting control of the size and location of things and the gaps between them can be a real challenge for Web designers. Most of the mystery and frustration that designers experience stems from not understanding the CSS Box Model, which defines how things behave and provides a rich set of tools for managing widths, heights, margins, and padding. Today's lesson is all about solving the mysteries and overcoming the frustrations by exposing the secrets of the ever-important CSS Box Model.

Creating Modern Page Layouts

Modern business websites often use page layouts that include a header, footer, sidebar columns, and a navigation bar. Historically, these layouts were done using HTML tables or div tags. Now and in the future, we'll be using a new set of layout tags in HTML5 to define our layout sections. In today's lesson, you'll learn what those tags are, how to make them work in new and older browsers alike, and some professional-grade techniques for styling them with CSS.

Making a Multi-column Layout

Today's lesson will be all about adding side columns to your layout, be it a left column, a right column, or both left and right columns. As an added bonus, we'll add a vertical navigation bar to a side column with the links large enough that they're easy to work with a mouse, as well as a fingertip or stylus on a mobile touch screen.