I have been teaching OO, using Java, for 0ver 10 years now. My son (Paul Gries, University of Toronto) have developed a model of classes and objects that allow students to understand what objects are almost immediately, and my introductory course at Cornell, taken by 130-200 students each semester, teaches OO first. The students learn about assignment and expressions the first day. Then comes objects, class definitions, subclasses, inheritance, constructors, etc. before the students see the assignment statement. It works. ProgramLive is an introductory programming text, using Java, that speaks to you! For information on all of this, look at the following:

ProgramLive is a livetext: a text that relies not only on the printed word but also on graphics, animation, audio, the computer, and the active participation of the "reader". ProgramLive has over 250 recorded lectures, most 3-5 minutes long, with synched animations that appear in a window on the computer monitor. Of course, one can see the text of each lecture as it is being spoken, and one can print the text.

ProgramLive was coauthored by David's, Paul Gries, a Lecturer at the University of Toronto. The livetext benefits from 30 years of research and education in programming methodology by David Gries --tempered and modernized by the more forward looking Paul Gries. It is written to teach OO early or late, depending on the instructor's desires.

Here's an indication of how ProgramLive is viewed by others. Metrowerks liked ProgramLive's tutorial on using CodeWarrior so much that the tutorial is now included in the CodeWarrior Learning Edition.

Click here for more info on ProgramLive.

Click here for a student website for ProgramLive.

Multimedia Introduction to Programming Using Java

was published in September 2004, by Springer Verlag. It is tightly connected with the CD ProgramLive, with frequent pointers to related lectures and Java programs on the CD.