Java Summer 2026
This is me working through Liang’s “Introduction to Java Programming and Data Structures” from front to back, one chapter at a time. It isn’t a tutorial and it isn’t a tidy course recap. It’s just my raw notes: what actually clicked, the exercises I slogged through, and the honest bits about where I got stuck. The plan was to get through all 29 chapters before the summer ran out.
The grid below tracks how far I got, chapter by chapter, and the devlog underneath captures what I picked up along the way. Both updated by themselves whenever I pushed progress to the repo, and both stopped when I parked the project in August.
Progress
Section titled “Progress”All code and notes: JAVA-SUMMER-2026 on GitHub
Project Status: Parked
Section titled “Project Status: Parked”Parked on 6 August 2026, having started on 24 June. The chapter grid and the devlog above read
from progress.json in the repo, so they froze on that same date. The “last updated” date comes
from the repo’s latest commit instead, a round of Javadoc comments pushed on 9 August. What follows
is where the project actually stopped.
Where it got to
Section titled “Where it got to”Chapters 1 through 13 studied and worked through, with 78 exercise files in the repo, organised by week and chapter.
The counter reads 16 of 29 because chapters 14 to 16 are marked closed without being studied. That was deliberate: those three cover JavaFX, which falls outside the syllabus of both courses this was preparing for. GUI work is handled with Swing instead, following Eck’s Introduction to Programming Using Java. The decision is recorded in the devlog entry of 6 August.
Chapter 17 (Binary I/O) was opened and never finished.
The final project
Section titled “The final project”The last thing built was a console Tic-tac-toe: 9 classes, around 730 lines, designed so that each piece exercises a specific chapter instead of just producing a working game.
| Class | What it exercises |
|-------|-------------------|
| Board | Encapsulation of the 3x3 grid, win and draw detection |
| Player (abstract), HumanPlayer, AIPlayer | Abstract classes and polymorphism. The game loop holds Player references only, with no instanceof |
| InvalidMoveException | A custom checked exception for an occupied or out of range cell, so bad input never crashes the program |
| PlayerStats | Comparable and an overridden equals(), for rankings sorted by wins |
| StatsManager | ArrayList plus text I/O, persisting to stats.txt and starting clean when the file is missing |
| AIPlayer minimax | Full game tree search scoring terminal states only, an early taste of chapter 18 |
What was left out
Section titled “What was left out”Chapters 17 to 29, which is the entire data structures half of the book: recursion, generics, lists, stacks, queues, sets and maps, algorithm efficiency, sorting, binary search trees, AVL trees, hashing and graphs. That is the half that carries the most weight for the data structures course, and it is the half that is missing.
Where to pick it up
Section titled “Where to pick it up”- Finish chapter 17 (Binary I/O). It is already open and it is short.
- Chapter 18 (Recursion). The minimax in
AIPlayeris recursion in practice already, so this is the cheapest place to restart. - Chapters 19 to 21 (generics and collections), which make the rest of the book readable.
- Then the algorithms block, 22 to 29, in order.
All code and notes stay at JAVA-SUMMER-2026 on GitHub.