HFJ3: Chapter 5—

The big picture

To be honest, most of the material in this chapter is probably a bit basic if you are a solid programmer.

Even if you havent’ seen Java before, this should be easy reading.

Nevertheless, there may be a few points worth noticing.

One of them is an introduction to the idea of test-driven development.

We see the Java “for each” style loop, e.g.

for (int cell: locationCells) {
  // do something with cell
}

There are also introductions to

• using Math.random()
• using type casts on primitive types

Sections

Let’s build a Battleship-style game: “Sink a Startup”

This section just introduces the application that forms the basis of the chapter. It’s basically “battleship”, but they’ve decided to call it “sink a startup” to be trendy, I guess.

First, a high-level design

This shows the basic approach to the code.

The “Simple Startup Game” a gentler introduction

This section explains that before solving a more complex version of the problem, we solve a simplified version of the problem: a one-dimensional version instead of a two-dimensional version.

Developing a Class

In this section, they explain a particular approach to designing and writing code.

I wouldn’t get too hung on up their particular approach; I’m neither recommending it, nor critisizing it too harshly. It is helpful to understand though, since they use this approach throughout the book.

Writing the method implementations

Ok, this is a good section to read carefully, since it helps to reinforce the idea of test-driven development.

Writing test code for the SimpleStartup class

I don’t love the fact that they aren’t using JUnit here; you’d think that by now, that would be standard. But at least they are doing testing.

In this course, we’ll use a more professional approach to testing (specifically, the JUnit framework). That’s covered in the student tutorial here: https://ucsb-cs156.github.io/tutorials/student/student_ex04.html

Test code for the SimpleStartup class

The code here is basically a very small test harness. Why write that, though, when JUnit has already done it for you?

See https://ucsb-cs156.github.io/tutorials/student/student_ex04.html

The checkYourself() method

So this is the step where they try to get the test to pass by implementing the method.

Just the new stuff

Here, they introduce the foreach style loop, as well as post-increment (which should be familiar to you from C++), and the break keyword.

Final code for SimpleStartup and SimpleStartupTestDrive

They provide code here, but it has a bug. Can you find it without running the code?

Prep code for the SimpleStartupGame class Everything happens in main()

This is just pseudocode for the main method.

The game’s main() method

And now the Java code for the main method.

random() and getUserInput()

This is stuff you may want to pay attention to, since it introduces some tools that may be useful (and unfamiliar if you are new to Java).

One last class: GameHelper

This is a small helper class to deal with the specifics of getting user input.

Let’s play

This shows the user playing the game.

What’s this? A bug ?

There’s a bug, but the answer isnt revealed until the next chapter. Can you find it?

More about for loops

There are some good details here about for loops in Java, and how they may differ a bit from what you are used to in C++, so check these out.

Casting primitives

It’s helpful to check on this part as well, so that you understand what happens when you do various strange type casts.