This course is intended for all students who are new in programming and want to learn a programming language from the scratch. No prior programming skills are needed to participate within the course. It is also interesting for non-programmers who want to get the first insights in what developers actually do in their daily work.
The course covers the basic concepts of variables, value assignments to variables, operators on variables and conditional statements like the if-statement or the while-loop. It does not cover object-oriented programming.
The course utilizes a new approach to learn the basic concepts of programming utilizing the Java language by using the shell which is included since Java 9 within the Java installation package which is called JShell. So, the as minimum Java 9 is needed for practical examples within the course but any other higher version of the Java Developer Kit (JDK) which is downable for free is also suitable.
The shell enables you to run small programs while you type. Each and every line of the program which is typed in is immediately executed. This release you from the burden to learn the write-compile-run loop at the beginning and gives you a quick start. Of course for more complex development task like object oriented programming this is needed and also the learning of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) should be done. But these are more complex lectures which are excluded from the course by using the included shell JShell to give you a jump start.