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Difficulty
Intermediate
Duration
1h 19m
Students
173
Ratings
5/5
Description

This course looks at methods, which are named, self-contained blocks of code that you can call upon to help solve problems for you. We'll then take a look at some projects which will put methods into practice.

Learning Objectives

  • Understand the fundamentals of writing your own methods
  • Learn how to classify methods by their return types as well as their parameters
  • Learn about parameter passing schemes that are used by programming languages to determine how methods treat their parameters
  • Explore method overloading and two-dimensional arrays

Intended Audience

  • Beginner coders or anyone new to Java
  • Experienced Java programmers who want to maintain their Java knowledge
  • Developers looking to upskill for a project or career change
  • College students and anyone else studying Java

Prerequisites

This is a beginner-level course and can be taken by anyone with an interest in learning about Java.

Transcript

In this section, we've learned a huge amount about methods and how they can help us write better more manageable code. We now know that we can take large problems and break them down into smaller pieces, and then write methods to solve those smaller problems. Method overloading, in which multiple methods can have the same name but different parameter lists, was also discussed. We learned how to classify methods by return type and parameters and also learned about how methods can call other methods. 

We explored the topic of recursion, that is when a method calls itself and how we control what happens using at least one base case and one recursive case. In a side-topic lecture, we learned about 2D arrays and also integrated that knowledge with methods, which helped us greatly in our Tic-Tac-Toe project, which was arguably the most challenging project we've seen thus far in the course. That project required a lot of critical thinking and creativity, as well as pushing your skills to the limit. If you did complete it, that's fantastic. 

But even if you didn't, that's totally fine also. Consider coming back after you've worked through more of this course and try it again. You might find that your Java skill set has improved and your problem solving skills are greater. In the next section, we're going to start learning about classes and Object-Oriented Programming, also known as OOP, which will help us structure our programs to solve problems in a way that uses self-contained entities called objects to do a lot of the work for us. I'll see you there.

 

About the Author
Students
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Courses
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John has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and is a professional software engineer and consultant, as well as a computer science university professor and department chair.

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