Last Minute Larry

Last night (Sunday) I did 4 hours of study for Java, and I still felt like I didn't understand it

Tonight, I've done another 4 hours and I feel like I've made a small amount of progress. It's now week 2, and I'm still doing week 1's readings. Should have done more on the weekend.

I had a look at the assignment, and I've got no idea where to start. So far, I've worked all the way through Study Guide 1, I've done all the readings, I've done the self-check problems. I'm struggling on the exercises, and I find it really frustrating that there's no answers for the exercisers. I've done some googling to no avail. I feel like some of the exercises are significantly harder than the self-check problems, and it's frustrating that I can't check to see if I'm heading in the right direction. Note to future textbook writers: please make some of the exercise solutions available online...

I can't make it to the lecture tomorrow, I'm so glad the audio is recorded so I can listen later. Although there's nothing more boring than listening to a 2 hour lecture recording. I had a look at the demo program, and I cannot get it to run via command prompt - the javac command does not exist for me, and I don't know what to do.

It seems that the quickest and easiest way to complete assignment 1 is to use this week's demo program as a guide, as this is the first sample program I've seen this semester with multiple classes, constructors, accessors, modifiers, ie everything that is needed for the assignment. I think it's a good base, maybe it gives me 50% of what I need. My only concern is, in programming, when does it become plagiarising? At first glance, this assignment is basic - it's the building blocks for future assignments, and there's not too many ways to go about this. Although my scribbled notes do closely match the demo program, so maybe I just think about it the right way.

Tonight's Learnings

• I want to make all my variables public so I know that I can access them!! Although making the variables private and creating/updating via the methods makes sense, I still don't understand why this means my variables have to be private. Maybe it'll matter further down the track.
• I don't understand why I'd create a list of employees in a Java program. I want to create a database and connect to that. I can't think in terms of Java classes, but I can think in terms of databases. Drawing UML diagrams is helping me work out what goes in each class.

To Do

• Update the employee ID field to be a unique ID. I'm considering having a counter starting at 1000 and increasing, and using that increment (counter++)
• Finish creating UML diagrams