Fall 2024 Preparation

The Fall 2024 semester will begin August 20th. Here are some things you should do before to prepare for this course, which may increase your odds of success by ensuring you get started on the right path!

Accounts

GitHub

We will be using GitHub to manage programming assignments for the course. We will discuss the details elsewhere, but, for now, you should go ahead and sign up for an Education Account which will give you access to GitHub with additional benefits. Please use your MSU username as your github username so that I can more easily correlate your accounts. If you already have an account, though, don’t worry about your username.

Review

IDE

I do not care what IDE you use for this course, but it is important that you familiarize yourself with whatever IDE you choose so that you will be able to work effectively during the semester.

I will be using IntelliJ, in case you want to use what you will be seeing during lectures. There is a free community version avaialble, which is more than sufficient for our purposes.

Object Oriented Programming

To succeed in this course, it is absolutely critical that you understand the fundamentals of Object Oriented Programming. I would highly recommend pulling out an old textbook, and reviewing the material.

Working Ahead

We will be discussing the topics below during the semester, but getting a basic understanding of them now will really help you to jump into the course and effectively work with your code.

Git

If you want to get a head start and avoid some headaches, you may want to go ahead and read up on git, which is the tool you will use to download and submit programming assignments for this course. A good place to get started is reading the first few chapters of Pro Git.

Maven

You may also want to do some preliminary reading about maven, which is a project management/build tool that you will use to compile, build, and test your code. A good place to get started would be reading a few chapters of Maven by Example.

IDE, Again

Additionally, you may want to investigate how your chosen IDE integrates support for both git and maven.