For courses in Java programming.

Teaches Java programming faster, broader, and more deeply

The Deitels’ groundbreaking How to Program series explores fundamentals, object-oriented concepts, and intermediate-level topics for further study. Java How to Program: An Objects-Natural Approach is a friendly, contemporary, code-intensive, case study-oriented introduction to one of the world’s most popular programming languages. It offers real-world examples, early classes and objects, and the authors’ signature live-code approach that teaches by presenting concepts in the context of complete working programs.

The 12th Edition introduces an objects-natural approach that begins with programming fundamentals in early chapters, before students develop their own custom classes; however, this approach then provides abundant practice using powerful existing classes, quickly creating objects of those classes (typically with 1 line of code) and telling them to “strut their stuff” with a minimal number of Java statements. Additionally, genAI is integrated throughout for its potential to profoundly enhance Java education, with guidance for students on leveraging these tools effectively while maintaining a cautious and critical mindset. Students will use gen AI to learn genAI, with a focus on prompt engineering, crafting and refining prompts to achieve optimal results.

Hallmark features of this title

• Syntax coloring for all the Java code reflects how most Java integrated development environments (IDEs) and code editors syntax color code.
• Fonts for emphasis highlight on-screen components in bold (e.g., the File menu) and Java program text in a fixed-width font (e.g., int x = 5;).
• Illustrations and figures include abundant tables, line drawings, UML diagrams, programs and program outputs.
• Heavy math is avoided, leaving it for upper-level courses. Optional mathematical exercises and projects are included for science and engineering courses.
• End-of-chapter exercises include simple recall of important terminology and concepts, focusing on code function (“what does this code do?”); errors (“what’s wrong with this code?”); writing individual statements and small portions of methods and classes; writing complete methods, classes and programs; major projects; generative AI exercises that dig deeper into a variety of topics.
• Student preparation for industry: The authors use the terminology from the latest Java specification document in preference to general programming terms; they also show Java as it’s intended to be used with a rich collection of application programming case studies, focusing on computer science, artificial intelligence, data science and many other fields.

New and updated features of this title

• Approximately 600 integrated generative AI (genAI) prompt exercises: Most sections end with genAI prompt exercises (approximately 450) where students interact with genAIs using prompt engineering. In addition, many chapters include end-of-chapter genAI prompt exercises (approximately 150).
• The latest Java language features, library features and programming idioms are covered. New code examples and explanations will be provided on the authors’ blog and webpage to keep the content up to date.
• Streamlined contemporary treatment of object-oriented programming includes record classes, sealed classes and interfaces, and a new case study on programming to an interface, not an implementation, focusing on composition and dependency injection.
• Approximately 400 Checkpoint exercises and answers: Most sections in the core computer science Chapters 1 - 10 end with Checkpoint exercises for self-study, with each immediately followed by its answer. Students will read about a new concept, study and execute the corresponding code examples, then test their understanding with integrated fill-in-the-blank, true/false, discussion and code-based Checkpoint exercises and answers.
• Objects-Natural case studies: Object technology’s basic concepts and terminology are introduced in Chapter 1. Objects-natural case studies have been added on class String (Chapter 2), class BigInteger for supersized integers (Chapter 3), class BigDecimal for the precise monetary calculations required in business applications (Chapter 4), the Date/Time API (Chapter 5), class ArrayList (Chapter 6) for dynamically resizable arrays, regular expressions for locating patterns in text (Chapter 7), secret-key AES cryptography (Chapter 7) and public-key RSA cryptography (Chapter 11). Throughout the rest of the book, many other case studies use objects of Java API and open-source library classes extensively.
• Chapter 19, Building API-Based Java Generative AI Applications, demonstrates programmatically interacting with OpenAI’s APIs for text summarization, sentiment analysis, describing images for accessibility, translating text among languages, generating Java code, named-entity recognition, transcribing speech to text, synthesizing speech from text, creating closed captions for video, image generation and much more in the chapter’s 94 exercises.