Closing Thoughts

Activities 1.7 - 1.11

My only complaint is how finnicky the unit testing can be. In the activities which rely on using a specific variable, even valid usages of variables are marked incorrect. I tried to use String.format when possible throughout these activities (I know it’s not part of the curriculum, but I’m trying to hammer the syntax into my head), and that was counted as incorrect, because I needed to use string concatenation.

public class Test1
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        String animal = "ducks";
        String food = "chocolate croissants";
        System.out.println(
        String.format("My favorite animal is %s. My favorite food is %s.",
                     animal, food));

    }
}

correctly incorrect answer

public class Test1
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        String animal = "ducks";
        String food = "chocolate croissants";
        System.out.println("My favorite animal is " + animal + ". My favorite food is " + food + ".");

    }
}

less elegant but accepted correct answer

I understand that it’s probably a pain to keep track of whether a variable is actually being used correctly, but it would have been good to at least specify how the variable was supposed to be used, and what the sentence was supposed to look like.

General Thoughts

Other than my thoughts about the review lessons, I think the unit was by-in-large a good introduction to Java. No major complaints :)