Week 7 problems

At this point many of you are getting really involved with your projects. A word of caution – the course is set in a way allowing you to have web-accessible results from the very beginning of the course, but it doesn’t mean that all that you are doing you understand sufficiently deep.

Here is the main challenge of teaching Java on a good level but from the very beginning (not as Java 1, Java 2 and further courses): you can do simple little exercises without any understanding of how the real working programs work, or you can have a workable environment where some things are not clear but they work and getting deeper understanding by the week with new learning. I chose the second approach. But… it is important that you realize what is happening. You play (modify) some working examples but if you decide in you projects to get into unchartered waters – the lack of really deep understanding will immediately popup in various strange behaviors and errors.

Advice: do not be afraid of suddenly exposed problems but stick closer to the textbook examples in your project development. Don’t run ahead of the train. With every chapter your knowledge (if you really apply yourself) will grow and you will be able to enhance your project more and more. I will be giving you simple tasks as well as tasks on adding new features to your projects. If you suddenly get into problems with more complex use of the material – simplify it in a way to be closer to the textbook (even if some parts and statements you do not deeply understand – just use them as shown).

Of course, if the problem is in the learned material you have to reread the textbook and, possibly, do the Google research on the problem in various online tutorials and explanations. But of you see that the problem involves some more advanced topics – just post your problem to Q&A and if nobody gives a SIMPLE answer – it means that the explanation will have to wait until you will be able to understand the answer based on newly-learned material.

As a result, if you see a GUI problem (like some form of instability) – try to use all learned knowledge and if still no success – post the problem to the Q&A and switch to the key tasks of the current chapter. Thus instead of some complex graphical behavior you can use more simple variations not to fight with what you will learn later but to use your time for learning and using the current material (like logical forks, events, and later loops).

In week 7 such knowledge enhancement of GUI handling (in addition to various event handling methods) is the use of the repaint method in section 8.3.