[Grace-core] Programming with Grace

[Kim Bruce]

I've been making progress on rewriting my intro to programming text (Java: An eventful approach) to a Grace version:  "Programming with Grace".  I have now completed the first 5 chapters.  While there are no doubt many typos (and logic errors), I thought I would share what I have now.  The current version of the text is in the svn repository, but I've attached the pdf here for those who may not have access.

While the general outline follows the earlier text, I find myself pleasantly surprised by what I can now omit.  I ignored type annotations for the first 4 chapters, but made that the focus of chapter 5.  In the original text, Chapter 5 was filled with twiddly details about ints vs doubles, why you must be careful with == vs equals, etc..  I was able to reduce the length of the chapter by about 50%, even taking the extra space to introduce types.

The book is intended for novices, so it starts out pretty slowly, but with lots of examples, especially to introduce graphics and event-driven programming (responding to mouse events).  I'll start working now on Chapter 6 on classes and then move on to (Chapter 7) while loops and (Chapter 8) issues of when to use parameters, instance variables, and local variables.  Chapter 9 in the original introduces threads and concurrency (but without race conditions).  That will require the largest change (replacing threads by timers) as we don't have threads (or actors) yet.

The original text had 21 chapters, so I still have a ways to go, but I'll probably aim for finishing the first 18 so I can use the text in the fall.

Please let me know if you have an comments/criticisms/suggestion or find any errors/typos, etc.

Kim

P.S.  I've been making minor changes to the objectdraw library and haven't updated it consistently yet.  Let me know if you'd like a copy of the current version for writing programs.


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