Blue Pelican Java

by Charles Cook

"Blue Pelican Java" is a somewhat unusual high school computer science textbook. Most computer science texts will begin with a section on the history of computers followed with a flurry of definitions that are just "so many words" to the average student. The approach here is to first give the student some experience upon which to hang the definitions that come later. The usual practice of introducing classes and objects is deferred until the student has a firm grasp of the fundamentals (loops, decision structures, etc). Thus, the beginning student is not overwhelmed by the simultaneous introduction of OOPs and the fundamentals. The book includes plenty of exercises (many in "contest" form), programming projects, and a huge appendix.

542 pages, Hardcover

First published July 6, 2005

Reviews

[Joshua Martinez · Rating 5 out of 5]

System.out.println(“Hello World”); Do you know what this means? Do you want to? Unfortunately, most people are not able to understand what this means. All this simple line of code does is print “Hello World” on the screen, but this is the basics of the computer language Java. Everyone should read Blue Pelican Java by Charles E. Cook as knowing computer concepts like math and algorithms is crucial in today’s technology filled world.

The Blue Pelican Java starts out simple but presents more useful stuff as the book progresses. It starts with the Hello World project you saw above and then progresses to basic arithmetic. The book explains how to add, subtract, multiple and divide all in code. Hopefully this seems basic, but later on in this book, the math becomes more advanced. It covers how to use the Java Math class which includes exponents, logarithms, and even trigonometry. The book also teaches how to work with binary, octal, and hexadecimal numbers. This is different than the base ten decimal system we are used to. In base ten decimal there are the digits 0-9, in base two binary there are the digits 0 and 1, in base 8 octal there are digits 0-7, and in base sixteen hexadecimal there are the digits 0-9 and letters A-E. A16 has a decimal value of ten and E16 has a decimal value of fifteen and B-D fall in between. An example of this would be E16 + C16 = 27. This is the kind of math lessons the Blue Pelican Java book teaches.

The book then begins to teach more advanced problem solving algorithms. It talks about Lists, ArrayLists, Trees, Heaps, and Arrays which are all data storing structures. The book then teaches different ways to sort this data. There are several different types of sorts like binary, merge, selection, insertion, bubble, and quick. Once data is sorted it can be searched through with different types of search algorithms like linear, binary, and interpolation. The book also teaches ways to evaluate the efficiency of the algorithms. This is called Big O notation, with some examples being O(n), O(nlogn) O(n3). This is some of the advanced problem solving material the book covers.
The Blue Pelican Java book teaches both basic and some advanced Java. It has lessons in arithmetic, numbering systems, sorting and searching algorithms, and Big O notation. These are all important concepts in coding. Everyone should read this book as knowing a computer language is crucial in today’s technology filled world.