The exemplar for the Squeaky Clean exercise uses loops and conditionals, but the exercise isn’t dependant on either of this. I think it needs to be moved lower down the track.
Original Email that alerted me to below:
Hi everyone at Exercise, im Jennifer ! Im really appreciative of the work you’ve done with this website and how its teaching us all different languages that in todays world will give us skills, more knowledge and in my case hopefully a better future in my personal life.
But I do have a comment that I just thought I needed to express, if it’s useful. I think the road to learn Java is not clear or linear (maybe it can’t be and im just too noob to tell) but for example im dealing with Char part and trying to solve the exercise and since there’s another block for learning conditionals I thought I didn’t needed that (and I haven’t seen it in my road to learn Java at exercism) so was not using it to solve Squeaky Clean, but oh surprise I do need it. And I think it messes up with my head that I haven’t learned that or approve the block for conditionals and in char type I have to use it. I feel that if it was more clear that I needed to go over the other one first I wouldn’t be frustrated with this squeaky clean exercise. Maybe in the future, there could be an easy roadmap to follow exercism at a pace where a beginner in Java can actually complete an exercise with full confidence that only the subject of the exercise (and previous ones) will be needed in order to complete the exercise. I understand I need to further investigate some topics, like in Strings that I needed to click on Hints and click through the links in order to learn more about the subject, but in this scenario there wasn’t any indication that I needed that. Could be me just being dumb for java, but I am trying.
I appreciate whenever you can read this, thank you
As a beginner in Java and coding in general. I agree with this poster and would like to offer my experience as well.
My learning progression so far from basics > Strings > Booleans > String-Builder
However, I find “Squeaky Clean” exercise after finish Strings is a bit of a jump.
Without prior knowledge of conditions or loops, I doubt I could have solve this exercises, particularly just using existing String, StringBuilder, and Character static methods is a bit too hard. The hint especially lean toward Character Method which I think will goes well after learning If-Else conditional exercise.
I’ve also noticed this issue. Another similar, but maybe slightly more problematic one is that the exercise at the end of the Arrays section requires usage/knowledge of loops, but the exercises at the end of each chapter on loops (For Loops and For-Each Loops) requires usage/knowledge of arrays. This catch-22 could make things more difficult than necessary for people that have never seen either concept.
Edit: Actually sorry, after closer inspection, the exercise at the end of each of those chapters is the same (Bird Watcher). So let me investigate this further to see if there’s any acual catch-22 occurring.
There was no catch-22. But I guess the same exercise is used for all three chapters (arrays, for loops, and for-each loops). So once you complete it at the end of one chapter, it’s marked complete for the other two chapters.
I second that “Squeaky Clean” appears too early and slows progress through the early Java concepts.
I am an experienced engineer looking to learn Java and am comfortable with the concepts of loops and conditionals. However, due to the exercise’s position in the track I spent a lot of time trying to work out how to complete it without using them. Once I decided that this wasn’t possible I really enjoyed “Squeaky Clean” and learning how loops and conditionals are done in Java, but can see it having a negative impact on people new to coding.
It looks straightforward to update the exercises pre-requisites in the config.json file, but this would leave the Chars concept without a stand-alone exercise. @iHiD is that acceptable?
I think its easier and better just to change the exercises pre-requisite to something later in the track. If we do that then the Chars concept will still have this exercise - it’ll just be later.
