Introduction to Java

We’ll start out with discussing the history of Java, and look at some of the concepts that shape the language.

In this chapter, we’re going to talk about some of the terminology that we use in object oriented programming.

In this module we’ll look at basic syntax, keywords and variable names.

In this module we’re going to go through all the different categories of operators in Java. We’ll discuss how they work and look at examples of each one.

An object is a grouping of data and methods together into one package. Each object in memory will be unique and will have its own values for its fields.

There will always be a need for you to write your own classes to use within your applications.

It’s not a good idea to allow direct access to the fields in our objects. If we allow that, we lose control over what values can be assigned to the fields

Constructors are special methods that you add to your class definition. Their job is to initialize the instance variables in an object.

Loops and other control structures make it easy to write code that’s going to be repeated.

Inheritance lets us take features that are common to two classes and move them up in the hierarchy.

When something goes wrong in a library call, an exception is thrown. It gives us the opportunity to solve the problem rather than having our program crash.