One day my son Davey-steamboat showed up in my office with my rated “R” Java tutorial in his hands. He asked me to teach him programming so he could create computer games. At that time I’ve already written  a couple of books on Java and taught multiple classes about computer  programming, but all of this was for grownups!  A search on Amazon could not offer anything but books for dummies, but Davey is not a dummy! After spending hours on Google I found either some poor attempts to create Java courses for kids, or some reader-rabbit-style books. Guess what? I decided to write one.  To help me understand the mentality of the little  people, I decided to ask  Davey to become my first kid student.

This series will be useful for the following groups of people

•    Kids from 11 to 18 years old
•    School computer teachers
•    Parents who want to teach their kids programming
•    Complete beginners in programming (your age does not matter as long as you feel that you’re a kid)

Even though I use a simple language while explaining programming, I promise to treat my readers with respect. I’m not going to write  something like “Dear friend! You are about to begin a new and exciting journey…”.Yeah, right! Just get to the point! 

The book became really popular around the world and this series of episodes is yet another attempt to ignite you interest in programming  in general and in Java programming language in particular. We are going to  create a calculator that looks and works similarly to the one that you have in your computer.  In the second part of the series we’ll create together  game programs Tic-Tac-Toe and  Ping-Pong.

You’ll need to get used to the slang of professional programmers, and all important words will be printed in  this font.

Java language elements and programs will be shown  in a different font, for example String.

This series does not cover each and every element of the Java language, otherwise it would be too fat and boring. But at the end of each chapter there is a section Additional Reading wit links to  Web sites with more detailed explanations of the subject.

Some of the episodes will have homework. Oops, should I replace homework with another word? Some of the episodes will have fun assignments. If these assignments seem too easy for you, please, please, please, try to  do assignments from the section Practice for Smarty Pants. Actually, if you are reading this article, you are definitely a smart kid and should try to complete all the assignments.

Happy Java Coding!