The purpose of this book is to provide a simple introduction to Java programming with the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment. The book has been designed for students who are undertaking the two year WJEC A-level course in Computer Science. The objective is to produce simple example program applications which illustrate a range of theoretical concepts, such as: abstract data structures, object oriented programming, random access and indexed sequential files, and batch processing by sequential update. In this way, it is hoped the students will gain a practical appreciation of the value of these computing techniques.

By working through the example programs in this book, students should gain an understanding of basic interface construction, processing and file handling operations in an object oriented Java environment, and a number of important standard algorithms included in the A-level course.