You will find the course more difficult than somebody with good functional programming skills and experience. However, I will do my best to introduce concepts that you should know for the successful completion of this course. It will however involve more effort on your part.
Indeed, it has been suggested in the past that a person with functional programming experience is locked into that way of thinking, making it more difficult for them to take an object based approach to programming.
Yes, there are two. At about week 5 there will be an assignment involving your knowledge to that point, and again at week 9 there will be a larger Java based assignment. I can't estimate as yet the amount of work involved, but it will be of the order of days. It will be possible to complete this work without actually visiting DCU, once you have a PC available to you. The assignment may also be submitted electronically.
C++ is a useful language, with many people using it as part of industrial projects. In this course we will introduce the concepts of object oriented programming in C++, but we will not examine advanced topics, such as Windows/X-Windows programming.
Java is a new language, that is gaining industrial acceptance. It is especially powerful for small applications and web based applications. The language is well defined and well structured. Indeed, it is my preferred language for software development.
We will use Java to examine the more advanced aspects of OOP, as well as concentrating on the advanced aspects of Java, such as threads, sockets, and the numerous APIs.
There has been a lot of hype about how easy Java is to use. This is true, but it is an advanced language. Anybody that told you they learned Java in a weekend is lying (or a bit naive).