• 'Some Questions and Answers about using Java in Computer Science Curricula', Doug Lea, 1996, http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/html/javaInCS.html
• ‘we probably over-exploited how easy it is to learn basics; sometimes forgetting that it still takes time to gain minimal programming maturity in any language’.

So in this course, the following order is used to teach the bread-and-butter topics:

• input from the keyboard and output to the screen
• if statements
• for statements
• method declarations
• other control statements

I'm not ashamed that you will find these taught in this order in many books that are teaching a language other than Java.