About the Course

What exactly we study

Java is more than just the syntax of the language. In real development, it always comes together with the virtual machine, the standard library, build tools, tests, database access, and other parts of the ecosystem. That is why the course goes beyond variables and loops and gradually shows the whole picture. The Java course covers more than 50 theory topics and provides more than 250 practical exercises.

To help you understand and remember the theory as well as possible, we have filled our course with a large number of vivid and memorable illustrations.

To help you practice and reinforce your practical skills, we created different types of exercises:

• Multiple-choice test;
• Complete a code fragment;
• Put the steps in the correct order;
• Match terms with definitions;
• Enter a direct answer;
• Select the incorrect line;
• Write complete code

It has been proven that different types of practice help reinforce material more effectively and train different ways of thinking. We decided to use the same principle in our course.

Course roadmap

So that the topics do not feel like a collection of unrelated chapters, the course is organized into three large layers:

• Foundation. Java basics, OOP, exceptions, collections, Generics, the Stream API, and lambda expressions. These are the things you need in order to read and write Java code with confidence.
• How Java works under the hood. IO and NIO, date and time, annotations, reflection, multithreading, the Java Memory Model, and the JVM internals.
• Building an application. JDBC, JPA, testing, Maven and Gradle, as well as design patterns. This is where separate pieces of knowledge start coming together into a familiar working stack.

The topics move from simpler ones to those that depend more heavily on previous knowledge. If something starts to feel difficult, that is not a sign that “I do not understand Java” — most often, it is worth going back one or two topics and checking the foundation.

How we explain code

We keep code examples small: one fragment — one idea. That makes it easier to see the mechanics instead of getting lost in dozens of surrounding lines.

public class Main {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        int completedTopics = 3;

        if (completedTopics > 0) {
            System.out.println(completedTopics);
        }
    }
}

Here, it is enough to notice two things: the condition checks that the value is greater than zero, and System.out.println() prints it to the console. Later, the same constructs will appear inside more realistic examples.