It goes without saying that programming is the key skill for software development professionals. It is also, traditionally, very hard to teach and learn. This talk by Ian Utting will introduce a set of free tools designed to introduce students to OO programming via Java in High Schools (Greenfoot), at the start of the University careers (BlueJ), and as they progress towards using full-scale professional IDEs (NetBeans/BlueJ Edition).

You can download the MP3 of this podcast episode directly, or copy and paste the java.net Community Corner mini-talks feed into a podcast client like Juice or iTunes. You can also subscribe via the iTunes Store.

Chris Adamson is the former editor of java.net.