Book excerpt: A Concise and Practical Introduction to Programming Algorithms in Java has two main goals. The first is for novice programmers to learn progressively the basic concepts underlying most imperative programming languages using Java. The second goal is to introduce new programmers to the very basic principles of thinking the algorithmic way and turning the algorithms into programs using the programming concepts of Java. The book is divided into two parts and includes: The fundamental notions of variables, expressions and assignments with type checking - Conditional and loop statements - Explanation of the concepts of functions with pass-by-value arguments and recursion - Fundamental sequential and bisection search techniques - Basic iterative and recursive sorting algorithms. Each chapter of the book concludes with a set of exercises to enable students to practice concepts covered.