AP CS A introduced me to the fundamental concepts of computer science and challenged me to explore how computing and technology can impact the world.
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Course and Exam Description [Source: College Board]
Java Reference Sheet [Source: College Board]
The basics of the basics. These serve as the building blocks of data manipulation in Java. They only serve one purpose: containing pure, simple values of a specific kind.
Slightly higher than primitives. Significantly more useful than primitives. They are used to represent real-world objects in a digital world, hold a state, and to perform more complex operations.
Need to repeat something? Iteration statements will solve your problems. With two basic and easy ways to iterate through a list or set of numbers, a for loop or while loop will do the trick.
Need to do something if a certain condition is true? Conditional statements will solve your problems. With if, if-else, and else statements, booleans come into play, and boy is it fun.
Arrays are used to store multiple values in a single variable, instead of declaring separate variables for each value. With the ability to index directly to an element, arrays are one of the best data structures to use.
Inheritance and classes allow you to manipulate programming without altering existing code by using subclasses, interfaces, and abstract classes to create a hierarchy (with you on top and, seldomly, on bottom). Inheritance is used to express interactions by organizing behaviors and attributes into classes.
Recursion allows you to solve larger problems by decomposing it into a set of simpler versions of the problem. By calling itself continuously, the code is compact and very complex to debug and understand. However, it does work much faster than using a for loop or a while loop, most of the time.