Introduction to Programming: Additional work for week 22

Now you have covered all the material in the Introduction to Programming course at Queen Mary, it might be useful to compare how similar material is taught in a commercial rather than an academic environment.

One difference is that Introduction to Programming is meant to be a course on programming that happens to use Java. It is not a course on "how to program in Java". Commercial courses tend to be more directly on how to use a particular product.

The Sun company that developed Java runs a number of training courses in the language. They also run a Certification process under which you can get a certificate from them showing you are (in their view) a certified Java programmer.

Sun do their own training courses for this. Sun's rough equivalent of our Introduction to Programming is a series of three courses:

These three courses together lead up to the Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform exam, which costs another £100 to take. As fits a course which is more Java-oriented than ours, there is material on Java topics we haven't covered such as networking and graphics, but nothing on more Computer Science oriented material, such as abstract data types.

You might like to note that the total cost of taking these three commercial courses given by Sun, plus the final exam is £4000. Plus VAT. Everything is covered in 13 days tuition.

Matthew Huntbach
26th March 2001