At SoftUni, we believe in our mission to help individuals worldwide adapt to the rapidly evolving digital landscape by developing sustainable and competitive skills that machines cannot easily replace. With this goal in mind, we launched SoftUni AI—a revolutionary educational initiative in artificial intelligence (AI), designed for both technical and non-technical professionals, regardless of prior experience.

SoftUni Global is pleased to present an overview of the progress made by SoftUni Serbia, our esteemed partner, from September 2022 to the end of November 2023. During this period, SoftUni Serbia has demonstrated consistent growth, innovation, and an unwavering commitment to delivering high-quality training for programming enthusiasts. The following highlights encapsulate the key achievements and milestones accomplished together.

Meet Iliya Idakiev. He is a Google Developer Expert (GDE) in Angular and Web Technologies and he has been working with JavaScript for over 7 years. He teaches at Sofia University and has been running his own company (Hillgrand) for almost 5 years where he develops various web applications. He likes to organize and participate in JavaScript events and he and his team have a YouTube channel (commitjs). 

Today he is here to answer some questions you probably have about the process of becoming a GDE.

In this lesson, you will become familiar with the Object-Relational Mapping technologies or the so-called ORMs. As a relative newcomer to programming, terms like ORMs can sound intimidating. The nice part about them is that they allow us to write code easier once we understand them.

Object-Relational Mapping technology is the idea of writing queries using your favorite programming language. We interact with a database using our language of choice instead of SQL.

Let’s say that we have an application. An ORM will convert the result of a database query into a class within our application. The selected columns will map to the class properties. On the other hand, if you push data towards the database, an ORM will map the properties of a class into columns of a table. When people say ORM, they refer to a framework that implements this technique. Here are some of the most frequently used ORM frameworks:  Entity Framework, Hibernate, Sequelize, and SQLAlchemy.

In the current lesson, you will learn the four pillars of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP).

Svetlin Nakov will explain to you what are the four main OOP Principles. He talks about the concepts of encapsulation, inheritance, abstraction, and polymorphism. Later, you will learn how to compare different objects in Java using equals() and compareTo() methods. Make sure that you understand everything since this is one of the most important topics in the programming world!

You will find many helpful examples and exercises, so make sure to practice what you’ve learned!

As always, we advise you to pause the video right before the solving part of each problem and try to do the exercises on your own first. Then, if you have difficulties, just watch the provided solutions in the video.

*The exercise descriptions are to be found in the PDF document at the end of this post.

Do you know what data structures and algorithms are and how they work together? It’s important to learn data structures and algorithms properly so you can understand the organizing principles behind web development and programming work. Get familiar with the common categories of algorithms such as Search, Sorting, Graph/Tree traversing.

Functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by applying and composing functions. Functional programming is declarative rather than imperative, and the application state flows through pure functions. Functional code tends to be more predictable and easier to test than imperative or object-oriented code — but if you’re unfamiliar with it and the common patterns associated with it, functional code can also seem a lot denser. Learn which of the programming languages are functional. 

In this free Java Foundations video, we will review another very important paradigm in the programming universe – Methods. We will find a few ways in which will make our code more organized and readable. Also, we are going to learn how to extend the functionality of our code.

Each of these topics is explained with many real-life examples and hands-on exercises. As always, we advise you to pause the video right before solving part of a problem and try to do the exercises on your own first. Then, if you have difficulties, just watch the provided solutions in the video. 

*The exercise descriptions are to be found in the PDF document at the end of this post.

In this lesson, Svetlin Nakov teaches how to read and work with console-based input and output. Learn how to read strings and numbers from the standard input and how to format and print text, numbers and other data to the standard output.