Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to: declare, initialize and assign values to variables; use operators and expressions; write Java instructions, cast variables from one type to the other; program using conditions and looping; develop code using arrays; utilize the String and StringBuffer data types and their library functions; process command-line arguments; create a custom Java class and instantiate objects from it using the new keyword; write functions with parameters, and call them passing arguments; demonstrate variable scope, passing by reference and passing by value; explain the difference between instance and static class members, use the public and private access specifiers, create inner and self-referential classes, use the null keyword, and create an array of objects.