A Personal Milestone

Well, I'm very excited. I called in Java...er...sick to work on Java today. Slow going, but I made progress. After spending a while reading, I went back to do the exercises from the chapters. I instantly recognized the first exercise: it was the one that basically made me decide a few months ago that, if I couldn't make the time to study every day, it wasn't worth going after. If only I'd known then what I know now...

So I struck out with my pencil and paper. Sometimes I am amazed how much clear thinking can be done with a piece of blank paper and a pencil rather than typing things out on screen. Here is the assignment:
Using the countDays() method from the DayCounter application, create an application that displays every date in a given year in a single list from January 1 to December 31.

The last time I worked on this exercise, I struggled with it for hours. Compiling what I thought would work again and again just to find that the code wouldn't compile each and every time. This time, after a little pencil work (just for the record, 5 lines of pseudocode and three lines of actual code), I took DayCounter and fashioned it into a functioning application in about twenty minutes. The only compiler error I got was because I had left the ";" off the m++;. I'm so excited! Here is the code; I used the countDays method without altering it.

class ExerciseOne {
        public static void main(String[] arguments) {
                int yearIn = 2004;
                int m = 1;
                int d = 0;

                if (arguments.length > 0)
                        yearIn = Integer.parseInt(arguments[0]);
        
                while (m < 13) {
                        d = countDays(m, yearIn);
                        for (int i = 1; i < d + 1; i++) {
                                System.out.println(m + "/" + i + "/" + yearIn);
                        }
                        m ++;
                }
        }

        static int countDays(int month, int year) {
                int count = -1;
                switch (month) {
                        case 1:
                        case 3:
                        case 5:
                        case 7:
                        case 8:
                        case 10:
                        case 12:
                                count = 31;
                                break;
                        case 4:
                        case 6:
                        case 9:
                        case 11:
                                count = 30;
                                break;
                        case 2:
                                if (year % 4 == 0)
                                        count = 29;
                                else
                                        count = 28;
                                if ((year % 100 == 0) & (year % 400 != 0))
                                        count = 28;
                }
                return count;
        }
}

Huzzah!