Students going into the IB Computer Science programme, particularly if it’s HL, will benefit from an understanding of the basics of Java programming and the ability to code simple programs before class begins.
On of the best online courses I’ve found are by a guy called John Purcell from Cave of Programming. His Youtube Java course is here:
If you sign up on his site, then you get to discuss the course with other users and perhaps even ask John questions.
https://caveofprogramming.teachable.com/p/java-for-complete-beginners
If you cover these lessons before you start the IB Computer Science course you will be very well prepared. As you can see they’re not very long. You will need to have an IDE installed. John uses Eclipse, which is certainly a good IDE, but most IB teachers tend to use Netbeans in class. My personal preference is IntelliJ.
These are the videos that have most relevance to the IB course. Those with asterisks are not directly examined but are useful for making working programs.
- A Hello World Program (4:46)
- Using Variables (7:53)
- Strings: Working With Text (9:21)
- While Loops (7:15)
- For Loops (9:28)
- If statements (12:26)
- Getting User Input* (8:52)
- Do … While (8:05)
- Switch (6:52)
- Arrays (9:46)
- Arrays of Strings (8:39)
- Multi-Dimensional Arrays (13:06)
- Classes and Objects (11:44)
- Methods (11:05)
- Getters and Return Values (10:31)
- Method Parameters (15:00)
- Setters and “this” (10:57)
- Constructors (10:18)
- Static (and Final) (19:46)
- String Builder and String Formatting* (19:43)
- The toString Method (11:06)
- Inheritance (14:09)
- Public, Private, Protected (19:57)
- Polymorphism (10:04)
- Encapsulation and the API Docs (11:17)