Java Programming for Engineers

Rating:
Summary: Do Engineers Need Java?
Review: Most Java programming books are written assuming that the reader will be programming full time. Fair enough. But there is an important subset of readers to whom programming is only a side issue. They have other interests and duties. Not surprisingly, the typical Java book is not geared towards them. For one thing, it might assume a prior level of programming experience which they simply do not have. Plus, the book might simply be too long, and go into programming issues that are not really germane to them.

Such a description of readers neatly encompasses many engineering students. The authors have attempted to address this by providing a Java text geared explicitly towards this audience. They describe Java to the minimal extent necessary for a student to quickly be able to do useful computations. Trickier than teaching Fortran, because the object oriented nature of Java needs a little more explanation and a little more getting used to by the student.

They assume that the usual engineering computation will not require a long program. It is for the latter that Java and its OO nature are really geared to. Hence, the authors deprecate such things like interfaces, though these are mentioned. Because these are meant to aid building complex structured code.

The graphics treatment is a little cursory, frankly. A student wanting to put a GUI in front of her code should really look elsewhere for guidance. But if a student has a primarily computational task, then a simple GUI might suffice, or even just stdout.