[Bluej-discuss] excersies solutions?

[Michael Kölling]

On 1 May 2007, at 11:01, Sara Aspery wrote:
>
> On that note, a plea to the authors (if they read this list). Please,
> please could future editions take into account those who are self
> teaching? How about two similar sets of exercises, one with and one
> without solutions? We do after all pay the same price as the students,
> but only receive part of the product. It's the only aspect that  
> lets the
> book down, otherwise it is really is excellent.

Yes, we do read this list!

The way I see it, there are two kinds of exercises in the book: those  
where solutions get discussed, and those where they don't.

Most of the exercises that are given in-chapter are discussed in  
detail immediately afterwards. Those are really the exercises that  
are made for self study - they prompt you to have a go yourself  
first, and then go on to discuss how you could do it.

They are really the meat of the book, and that's probably about half  
the exercises.

Then we stuck another set of exercises at the end of the chapters for  
teachers to use. For the reasons already discussed here, we don't  
like to make the solutions generally public. But we have created a  
mailing list specifically for this purpose, where people studying on  
their own (or students, for that matter) can discuss these exercises.

We usually encourage people to have a go at the exercise first, and  
then use the mailing list to get feedback, comments, or ask questions.

The address o that list subscription page is

	http://lists.bluej.org/mailman/listinfo/objects-first-discussion

We hope that this serves both sides: it doesn't give just the answers  
away (encouraging the kind of self-study others have mentioned here),  
but gives you a chance to get feedback and makes sure you don't get  
stuck.

Both David and I read the list and reply on it regularly.

Regards,

Michael

-- 
Michael Kölling
Computing Laboratory
University of Kent at Canterbury