Brief description
This module is suitable for students who have completed CS12230 or CS12320 but are embarking either on the Internet Computing degree or the Minor in Computer Science. It places more emphasis on worked examples but does not provide a route through to other computing degrees.

Aims
This module builds on the material covered in CS12230/CS12320 to further the development of participants' programming skills by:

• introducing more advanced facilities that are available to the software engineer to improve the robustness, reusability and maintainability of software;
• applying these skills in practice using the Java programming language.

Learning outcomes
The module concentrates on instilling a professional approach to software development. Further programming concepts are introduced in the context of developing more robust and reliable software. On successful completion of the module, students should:

• understand the importance of software design, coding and testing as demonstrated by their own software development;
• be able to analyse a problem and produce high quality software designs as shown by their project work;
• be able to produce more robust programs making full use of Java exceptions;
• be able to make data persist from one program run to another;
• demonstrate how classes can be made more reusable using Java interfaces;
• demonstrate full knowledge of the major facilities within the Java programming language;
• produce high quality software that is robust, reliable, reusable and maintainable.

Syllabus
1. Robust Programming - 4 Lectures
The need for a separate mechanism for handling erroneous code; throwing and catching exceptions. User defined exceptions.

2. Persistent Data - 4 Lectures
Advanced input/output and files. Worked example bringing together file handling and exceptions.

3. Abstract Data Types and Linear Data Structures - 7 Lectures
More on the ideas of abstraction and encapsulation. Java support for their implementation. An introduction to linear data structures: Stacks, Queues implemented using arrays and vectors.

4. Enhancing the Reusability of Classes - 5 Lectures
An introduction to Java interfaces: Sortable, Listable and the standard Iterator class. Using interfaces to produce a reusable List class.

5. An introduction to Graphical User Interfaces - 10 Lectures
Building on programming skills, this looks at developing graphical front ends to simple software systems introducing Java's AWT and Swing classes.