These exercises are designed to provide help according to the needs of the student. For example, some students will simply complete the exercise given the information and the task list in the exercise body; some students may want a few hints, while others may want a step-by-step guide to successfully complete a particular exercise. Students may use as much or as little help as they need per exercise. Moreover, since complete solutions are also provided, students can skip a few exercises and still be able to complete future exercises requiring the skipped ones.

Each exercise has a list of any prerequisite exercises, a list of skeleton code for you to start with, links to necessary API pages, and a text description of the exercise goal. In addition, there is a help page, with help for each task, and a solution page with links to files that comprise a solution to the exercise.

There are three fundamental exercise types:

"Blank screen"

The programmer is confronted with a "blank screen"; i.e., the programmer creates the entire desired functionality.

Extension

The programmer extends the functionality of an existing, correctly-working program.

Repair

The programmer repairs undesirable behavior in an existing program.

Where possible, the programmer shall be relieved from chores that are irrelevant or unrelated to the technique or concept under examination.

Where reasonable, a common thread shall run through the exercises for each lab section.

Given the constraints of the technique or concept under examination, the exercises shall be made as interesting or useful as possible without presenting an overly-complex programming problem to the student.

Exercises shall execute via the web unless a particular concept related to non-web execution is required or the browser does not support the capabilities yet.

In addition, exercises that must access Java features or library elements causing web security violations are not executed on the web.