Who created this course ?
This course was created by me Marcus Green.
I have been involved with Java since around 1998, when I put together what became http://www.jchq.net one of the most popular web sites aimed at people studying for the Sun Certified Java Programmers exam. I have been a programmer since around 1990 and have used C/C++, Visual Basic, Perl, Java and various other programming tools. At the time of writing I teach at York College of FE in Yorkshire UK
This course
This course is for people who want to learn about Java but have little previous programming experience. It is not aimed at the Sun Certified Programmers Exam, which is for people who already know how to program in Java.
If you have ever modified an Excel Macro by hand or done a little Visual Basic programming or even a little JavaScript then this course could be for you. If you have absolutly no previous programming experience you can probably still do the course but it might be more of a challenge.
The fact that this course is delivered in the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment www.moodle.org (VLE) means that it is interactive. You can post messages in the forum and have "live chats" with other people who are using the system. Note that you can move from one resource to another by clicking the resource widget at the top right hand side of the screen
To get the best from the course you need to take the tests and submit the assignments. For most people reading about a subject is not enough to learn it, you need to actual do it, so make sure you get your hands on the Java compiler and actually compile and run the example code. You will find out how to do this later on.
Additional resources
There are several freely available tutorials on learning Java. I have included several links to the tutorial from Sun, and you can see the main page at http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial. Bruce Eckel has written a good, if quite dense book on Java which you can either purchase a printed copy, or download an electronic version from http://www.mindview.net/Books/TIJ. Dick Baldwin has some excellent Java material available at http://www.dickbaldwin.com/tocint.htm.