My Java Journey - What you need

Welcome to the third post in this series of posts that attempts to introduce the beginner to programming using Java. Before you get started, I hope you have read the previous write-up about what Java is.

Any way, I have some Good news - Everything you need to write programs in Java can be obtained free online.

Text Editor
You will need a text editor to type the instructions that the computer will execute as your program. These instructions that you type are called your source code. The text editor you need here must be a plain text editor. In other words, it should not be able to add text formatting like bolding, italicizing and underlining. On a windows machine, you can use notepad. It is not advisable to use rich text editors like Wordpad, MS Word, Text Edit(Mac), etc. If it becomes crucial to your health that you should use one of those, please remember not to format the text and save it as plain text.

There are however some specialised text editors that make programming easier. Notepad++, Emacs, Sublime Text and Atom are some examples. These ones give you features like colour-coding, line numbering, code formatting and code suggestion which will make your programming easier. As if that is not good enough, there are Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) that simplify most of the work you’ll be doing during programming for you in one place. They provide syntax highlighting. Some  IDEs are smart enough to tell you better ways of writing some lines of code. Some of the common IDEs are NetBeans, Eclipse, IntelliJ and BlueJ. For the purposes of this series of post, I’ll be discussing only the use of Eclipse. You can use any other IDE that you are comfortable with.

Java Development Kit (JDK)

Apart from a text editor or IDE, you will definitely need the Java Development Kit. This is a free software that allows you to write programs in Java, compile them and deploy them. You can download a copy from the oracle site. The current version as of writing this is version 9. Just accept the license and download the version that is right for your platform. Install it and we’re good to go

Patience

That’s the last thing you will need before we begin. After a lot of internet search, I couldn’t find a link that allows you to download this one Laughing out loud.
I won’t speak much about this, all I’ll do is quote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.”

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