LEARNING TO PROGRAM ON YOUR OWN TIME(The Wisconsin Idea Project)

LEARNING TO PROGRAM ON YOUR OWN TIME

The Wisconsin Idea Project

What the Wisconsin Idea means to me is using my knowledge and education to promote learning to my peers and motivate anyone into getting educated. Not just to get a better job but to even improve as a person and member of society. For this reason, my website is dedicated in promoting people to learn about computer science and helping them get started by showing many different tools they can use and a path to start learning how to program.

Introduction to Programming in JAVA

This webpage is dedicated to helping anyone interested in learning to program get started. This will be done by utilizing basic, free tools that can be accessed by anyone with a computer. This topic was chosen in order to promote learning about programming to anyone one interested, but not able to take a computer science class at a University or High School.

Reasons To Learn Programming

There are many different reasons to learn how to program, whether it is just a hobby or career. As humanity continues to move more and more towards electronic dependency computer science jobs continue to grow. What is that? You do not want a career in computer science? Well neither do I, but that does not mean it is not very useful. As an engineer I personally need to do a lot of tedious problems with sometime difficult calculations. However, using computer science knowledge, one can simply right a short program to compute calculations for you. You could write a program that calculates volumes of shapes given dimensions, does trigonometry, calculus, the applications are limitless and require very little programming experience! While, I do not recommend cheating on work you must show, it is a great way to make sure you are getting the correct answers. Even if none of those reasons apply to you, it can still be fun to sit back and make programs that do simple tasks you enjoy.

Description

We will be going through multiple processes and tools that can be utilized to getting started with programming in any language. First we will have an introduction to FREE online learning websites taught by professors from the some of the top schools in the country that have many Computer Science courses. Then we will be going through obtaining and using the Eclipse programming environment (IDE - Integrated Development Environment) with multiple choices for languages. I will personally be using JAVA in my tutorial. This webpage is targeted for anyone interested in beginning to learn about Computer Science for any reason. This could be as a career, for a hobby, or to use as a tool for calculations.

List of Courses and Learning Material

This is a list of good choices for free online courses. I will recommend a few introductory course options. Think about what language you want to learn and what topics you want to cover when deciding your first course!

Computer Science 101: A 6 week course taught by a professor from Stanford University, this course has a good overview of basic concepts of Computer Science. It is intended for someone who has no prior experience. Other topics include: How Computer hardware works, How the internet works, and more basic concepts of modern computing. This would be my most recommended for someone interested in Programming but not sure if they would like it. The course uses a variant of the Java language and all programming is done in your web browser with no need for downloading a program.

Introduction to Computer Science This course is 5 weeks and taught by a professor from the University of Virginia. This course focuses more on just learning to write programs than other aspects of computing. It is another good option as an intro course. The website also has a lot of good choices for classes to take after you gain some programming experience. This course uses Python, so if that is the language you wish to learn this would be a great option.

Plenty of other good FREE computer science course options can be found by clicking on the respective images:

or at

If you are a good indpendent learner or ever get stuck on programming issue another great tool is Oracle's (Maker of Java) website that has information about the java language that comes from there text book The Java Tutorial, Fourth Edition. This can accessed by clicking on this link.

Choosing Your Software for Writing Programs (IDE)

If you decide to take the Introduction to Computer Science course from Udacity than you should Download Python. This version of python uses a different Integrated Development than I do in my tutorial so keep that in mind. The Eclipse IDE can be downloaded here. Your choices for languages are C/C++ and JAVA. Again, keep in mind that my tutorial is eclipse for JAVA. You will also need a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) for running your programs if using eclipse. It can be found here.

Link to Eclipse Video Tutorial

Here is a link to the video tutorial of getting started with Eclipse for Java (Click on the Image):

The video starts from the first time opening the software, so download Eclipse first!

What's next?

If I had more than just myself and more time to dedicate to this webpage I would add a tutorial on an introduction to variables and looping with my own ideas for programs that a viewer could write using those skills that would have useful, real life applications. For example, a program that can compute a difficult equation or mathmatical process for a user.

Author: Theodore J. Dunne, University of Wisconsin-Madison