FAQ(Frequently Asked Questions) on javapassion.com courses

 
Please read this FAQ first before you post a question to the class alias (or before you send an email to Sang Shin)!

Taking "javapassion.com" Courses

• Online attendees of this course are expected to do the following course work
  
• Read the pre-class reading material (if there is one) or tutorials mentioned under resources section of each topic at the convenient time of their choice - the dates are specified only as a guideline
  
• Read the presentation slides at the convenient time of their choice
• Do the weekly homework - the due date of all homework's is two weeks after the final class of the current session so you have plenty of time to finish them - for example, if a course runs starts from March 1st, 2009 to Sep. 10th, 2009, the due date of all homeworks is Sep. 24th, 2009 midnight U.S. Eastern Time
  
• Participate in class email alias for asking and answering questions or starting discussions. 
  
• At this time, I don't have any plan (nor resource) to offer real-time webcasting
  

• It is my plan to offer each javapassion.com online courses on a regular basis maybe twice a year of course if time permits
  
• A subsequent session will get started roughly 6 to 8 weeks after the previous session ends.  The exact date will be announced at each course's website and through each course's email alias.

• You can take this course on your own pace, indeed.  The dates are there mainly as a guideline.
• I am also using the dates as the dates I post the final version of the course contents -  presentation slides, hands-on labs, and homeworks.   
  

• Even though most contents are ready for downloading even before the dates, there are some contents that might not be ready until the dates specified, especially new topics of a new course..

• No, you don't have to wait.  You can register anytime.  You can study the material and submit homework even before the starting date.
  

• Yes.  You can register anytime before the class ends and as long as you submit all your homework's before the deadline (2 weeks after the last class), you are considered to be in the class.

• The javapassion.com online course was initially started to teach J2EE Programming, which was (and of course still is) a highly sought-after expertise by employers,  to unemployed software engineers in New England area in collaboration with New England Java Users Group (NEJUG). 
  
• Please see how this course got started
  
• If you want to make donations, please feel free to do so.  My paypal id is sang.shin@sun.com.  But this is completely voluntary.
• As it currently stands - as long as I am employed full-time -, it is my intention to offer javapassion.com courses as free online courses.  But I am not ruling out a possibility that some or all javapassion.com courses will be offered as paid or subscription-based ones in the future.
  

• No. You can just send the homework's you have not done since I keep all the homework's submitted for 2 years

Using and Helping javapassion.com courses

• Usage of javapassion.com course contents is free for non-profit organizations, which includes schools, colleges & universities, JUGs, etc.  Please let me (sang.shin@sun.com) know if you using them, however, letting me know your school and courses.
  
• Usage of javapassion.com course contents for internal training for a non-profit company needs to be approved by Sang Shin.
• If you have other usage case, please send an email to Sang Shin (sang.shin@sun.com).
  

• There are already some efforts of translating javapassion.com into languages other than English. Please send an email to Sang Shin (sang.shin@sun.com) if you would like to participate in translation effort.

• There are many things you can help.  Please contact me (sang.shin@sun.com).
  

Regarding Communicating with Sang Shin

• The answer is unfortunately "NO".  Not because I don't want to respond to you but because I simply don't have time to do so.  The reality is that if I take the questions directly sent to me and try to answer them, I will  probably have to quit my job or give up working on other important tasks such as creating and updating javapassion.com course contents. 
  
• I am teaching javapassion.com online courses in my spare time and the combination of my daytime job, which is actually pretty demanding - who else's is not? :-) -, with javapassion.com work virtually leaves no time - I have to use whatever extra time I have for essential activities such as eating, sleeping, etc.  :-) So if you don't receive any response from me, it is nothing personal. 
  
• In general, posting questions (technical or non-technical) to the class alias (instead of sending it directly to me) is a strongly recommended practice. 
  
• However, please feel to send me "mistakes"/"typo" you find in the course contents - specifying <which course>, <which lab>, <which exercise>, <description of the problem> in the email.  Thanks much.

Homework's

• "Where to", "what files", and "how to" submit homework's are described at the end of each hands-on lab.  For example, for the class of "Web Application Structure" topic of Java EE programming course, the homework is specified at the end of hands-on lab of the same topic.
  
• http://www.javapassion.com/handsonlabs/webappstructure/#Homework_Exercise
  

• It depends on the course.  Please go to the course website for course specific prerequisite.

• NetBeans 6.5.1 or 6.7.
  

• Each hands-on lab has homework exercise at the end.
  

• Each hands-on lab has "where to send" and "what to send" information at the end of the document.
  

• If you submitted all the homework's, you will be given a certificate.
• The certificate has no affiliation with any colleges, educational institution, company.  Instead, it is just my personal recognition that you have done your share of work, thus successfully finished the course.
• You will be noted as "Graduates of the course" in the class website. You can see an example from another free online class I teach.
• http://www.javapassion.com/j2ee/J2EEProgrammingGraduates.html
  
• At the end of the course, I will ask you to send your personal information, for example, as following:
  
• The deadline for submitting all homework's is <due date>..  If you submitted all homework's, please send an email to the homework alias (<homework alias of a course>) with the following information.  The subject of the email should be <specific subject for a course and session>.
  
• <First-name Last-name>, <Nationality or Country of Origin>, <One paragraph you want to say about this course (optional)>
• Sang Shin, Korea, This is a great course or whatever you want to say....

• If your email with homework attachment is not bounced back, please assume I received it.  The scheme has been working for me for serveral years without a major problem.

• The homework's are designed such that you know you have done your work or not.   In other words, you should not submit a homework unless the work is done.  If there is a vagueness in the homework description, please post it to the class alias so that it can be discussed and corrected by the instructors.
  
• Unless it is an extremely unusual case, you will not get an individual response from the instructors indicating the quality of your individual homework.  This is more or less due to time constraint of the instructors.  Given that there are thousands of students taking the class, and instructors are teaching this class as their spare time activity, there is simply no way each homework can be reviewed/commented/corresponded by instructors.
  

• The due date of the all homework's is 2 weeks after the last class of the current session so you have plenty of time to submit your homework's.

• Yes.

• Yes, but you will not get a certificate.

How we communicate in this course

• The class email aliases are set up for attendees to post questions, share knowledge, and exchange ideas among themselves during the course period.  Attendees are strongly encouraged to post technical questions, interesting articles, tools, sample programs or anything that is relevant to the class.

• When you are posting a question, please make sure you've done your share of work.  Make sure you read the relevant documentation, presentation slides, FAQ, and other postings before you post your question.
• Also please capture as much relevant  information as possible such as following 
• trace of the exception
• screen output message of the failure
• environment variable settings
• OS platform you use
  
• Even though the folks who usually answer questions (including myself and Sean) are trying to address them as speedy and as best as they can, please understand that these folks are using their spare time and resource to do these as voluntary activities.  Please also note that answering questions like "I did this and somehow it doesn't work" kind of questions are never easy to answer.  Consequently not all questions can be nor would be answered in timely manner.
• Please ask questions that are relevant to the topics of the week if possible so that we can have more focused discussions.
  
• If you find any answers to the questions, please feel free to post to the alias so that other people can benefit.
• I know sometimes you want to send technical questions directly to me (Sang Shin)  but doing so is strongly discouraged due to the following reasons:
• In most cases, you will get faster responses by posting them to the class alias.  After all, that is what the community is all about. I expect members to help each other on technical questions.
  
• I personally cannot keep track of who sent what questions due to the large number of emails I have to deal with. (I am sure many of you are in the same boat.) Your questions posted on the class alias will remain there so that they can answered at a later time by someone.
  
• In general, I am always and extremely stretched out in terms of time. 
  

• Please do not post a simple "Thank you" note or "Hello" message to the class alias.  This class alias is subscribed by several thousand people so please be aware that these messages are considered as noises by many people.
• Given that we are all living in "instant messaging" age, it is not unreasonable to see folks posting their messages using just lower case letters like following and I know it is perfectly acceptable in instant messaging.
• "i write this with only lower case letter i." (Not recommended)
• But for posting messages to an email alias where more than several thousands of people are subscribing, I would recommend everyone to follow a couple of guidelines if possible.
• Start a statement with a capital letter like  following.
•  "I write this with a capital letter I." (Recommended)
• Please do not use short-hand.
• "u are my friend." (Not recommended)
• "You are my friend." (Recommended)
• It is generally a good practice to remove irrelevant contents when you reply.
  
• Now having said that, I know large percentage of the folks on this alias are not speaking English as their first language (including myself - I speak Korean at home.)  Please don't feel intimidated in posting in English. Less than perfect English grammar is perfectly acceptable.

• No, you don't have to read all the emails in order to proceed with this course.  All the required materials are going to be accessible from the class website. 
  

• Yes, you can.  But I would personally ask you to stay on the alias and change the delivery option to "no email" since the class alias is how I keep track of how many people have registered.
  

• A large number of postings on a class alias indicates that we are building a very successful community. So it is not a bad thing.  Of course, the quality of the postings should be such that people want to read them.
  
• It is very typical there is a very large number of postings in the beginning of the a new course simply because there are lots of  newbie questions.  Things will settle down to reasonable levels as we, as a group, begin to learn the best way to conduct the class.

Software and IDE

• Windows, Solaris X86, Solaris Sparc, Linux, Mac OS, or whatever platform that supports Java
  

• In theory, you could use other IDE's other than NetBeans. Practically, it would be much easier for you to use NetBeans since most of the hands-on labs are created with NetBeans in mind.  It would require minimum effort (less than 5 minutes) to learn NetBeans since you can get by just using minimal features of NetBeans in most cases. (Of course, you are welcome  to and in fact recommended to utilize all the wonderful features of it.)
  
• The selection of NetBeans as an IDE of choice for this course is mainly due to its "best out of the box" experience (meaning you don't have to search for plug-ins yourself) it provides.