I am taking a basic java programming class. Unfortunetly it is an online class, and I am unable to find a tutor. We are using the book Java How to Program sixth Ed. and are going through two to three chapters a week. I am soo lost!! My next lab due is to use n overloaded counstructoer to output date in muti formats such as mm/dd/yyy, june 14, 1992 and ddd yyyy. I don't know what I'm doing and just reading the book is not helping me!! I also have my midterm next week. does anyone know if there is an online tutorial that shows how to do this stuff. Not just to read text, but actual movie like things.

You should never expect to learn anything from just reading a textbook.
You HAVE to apply what you read immediately and frequently thereafter in real programs.

If your book has exercises, DO THEM. If it doesn't, think up some of your own.

I do the excercizes and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. The problem is I don't understand what I'm doing. Maybe I'm making it harder than it is I don't know. I've gotten websites and things but they say the same thing as the book. I just doesn't seem clear to me. I get some of it. I understand some symbols. but I don't know things like how to use output symbols such as %sn\ I don't get what each represents. I know where they should be used and basically they are calling information from another place in the text, but how do I use them?

experiment, that's all I can say. Just having it explained yet another time isn't going to do much good if you don't see the logic yet.

You WON'T understand certain concept untill your very experienced with java. Polymorphism, inheritance, and other concepts like that aren't very difficult, but you just want grasp it starting out. I wouldn't even waste too much time looking at it, untill you have a good understanding of java, then it is very important that you study those topics. But, once you have a good understanding of the language you won't find it difficult.

Hi everyone,

You can go to sun's offical website and they have some pretty good awt and swing tutorials over there

Richard West

If u dont understand deitels book read it again, best advice imo. has lots of source code to look at so u dont have to be writing programs to know what hes talking about

here are overloaded constructors

public class methodTest{
public methodTest(){ // this ones the default one
}
public methodTest(int a){
}
public methodTest(int a, int b){
}

They are overloaded because they have different signatures, if you say
methodTest obj = new methodTest();
it'll call const # 1
methodTest obj1 = new methodTest(1);
it'll call const #2
methodTest obj2 = new methodTest(1, 2);
const 3.

A far better and far more up to date book is Head First Java by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates.