Java Programming: Principles of Software Design

This course is a very well-designed course with meaningful projects. As a learner, nothing is more satisfying than being challenged with real-world applications and conquering the difficult projects.
In this course, the instructors take learners through basic concepts of interfaces and abstract classes, as well as introducing learners to Collections class as well as the Comparable interface in Java.

The first project is to filter a large database of earthquake occurrences, sort them out according to multiple criteria. This project familiarizes learners with how to implement interfaces and abstract classes in Java.

The second project is more challenging, implementing a Markov Model to generate random texts in different languages. This project is particularly challenging because not only learners need to persevere through the constructions of many classes and complicated methods, they also need to be very patient because the implementation uses the Random class quite often, and thus, making debugging less predictable. However, it was a very fulfilling experience being able to complete this project. After this project, I can feel comfortable moving on to intermediate Java classes.

The last project, and the most challenging, is the word-N-gram project, which also generates random texts, but to a higher level of sophistication. This is somewhat similar to a rudimentary machine learning problem: feed the program lots of training data (a long long prose like Romeo Juliet), then the machine can generate meaningful texts based on the statistics of words occurrences in the texts.

It is apparent that the Duke Course team has put in enormous effort into creating this course (and other courses in the series). They are challenging and intensive despite the friendly and fun vibe that instructors always give during their video presentations. The learning experience has been very good with all the courses in this specialization.