In this blog I will talk about how to start java. Now some of you may be thinking, “But isn’t this a blog on how to start programming?” You’re right, but I believe that the first step to learning programming is getting familiar with a language. So many people have trouble learning how to code because they are trying to learn everything at once, and as much as we’d like to think otherwise our brains just can’t do that.
Now that we know what we’re doing lets start. One of the most important things you can learn when it comes to coding is setting up your workspace, if you don’t understand what I mean by that: it’s where you actually write your code. For the purpose of this post I’m going to be using Visual Studio Code (vscode for short) as my text editor. If you don’t have vscode installed go ahead and do so now. Once installed open up vscode, on the top left corner click File -> Open Folder… notice the … after folder, click it and select the folder where you want your project files to be stored in.
Now that we’ve set up our file system lets install language support for Java! We’ll do this by installing an extension called “Language
The Java programming language is one of the most popular and widely used programming languages in the world today. It is simple to learn, fast, powerful, and portable across platforms. Java has a large open source ecosystem with strong commercial support.
There are many ways to get started with Java. This blog walks through how to get started using vscode with java.
Step One: Install JDK
The first thing that needs to be installed is the JDK or Java Development Kit. Visual Studio Code will not work without it. Download JDK here.
Step Two: Install VS Code
Next, you need to install vscode itself. Download vscode here.
Step Three (Optional): Install Extensions
VSCode comes shipped with many extensions that are not installed by default but can be found in its extension marketplace (accessible via View > Extensions). Some of these extensions include:
As a novice programmer, learning Java isn’t always easy. Well, any programming language for that matter can be difficult to start with, and there are multiple reasons for this. Java is an example of a high-level language; other high-level languages you might have heard of are Python, C++, PHP, and Java Script.
As opposed to low-level languages, which are sometimes referred to as machine languages or assembly languages. Low-level languages are more difficult to program in because they are closer to what a computer can understand (binary code consisting of 0s and 1s); therefore high-level languages were created so that programming could be easier and more efficient.
Java is still considered to be a high level language. But it’s important to note that Java still contains low level elements; this tutorial will help you get familiar with how it works so you can write your own programs in the future!
Before we start, we need to make sure that java is installed. To do this, we can open up our terminal/command prompt and type “java -version”. If java is not found, you will be prompted with an error message.
After downloading the software and installing it on your computer, you need to set the class path. This is a very important step for installing java. The class path should include the path where java is installed on your computer.
Make sure to check the installation after setting the class path. This can be done by going to command prompt again and typing in “java -version”.
Once you are done with this step, you are ready to start coding!
So, you’ve decided to learn Java. Maybe you’ve got a programming project you want to complete or an idea for an app that you want to get off the ground.
Either way, Java is a great language to get started with for a few reasons:
-It is relatively easy to learn.
-It has a huge amount of documentation and examples online.
-It has quite a large community of active programmers who are willing to help.
-Once you know it, there are lots of jobs available that use it.
The VS Code team recently announced via the developer blog that it has added Java support to its ever-expanding catalog of programming languages. The team also announced that it is open sourcing the language server that powers Java within VS Code.
Java support in VS Code is provided by the Java Language Server, which is a new language server protocol implementation for Java. In addition, the extension includes an updated version of the jdt.ls language server built on top of Eclipse JDT Language Server, so users get all the goodness of that project out of the box.
The team has released the Java Language Server under an Apache 2 license and made it available on GitHub. The project’s wiki contains a lot more information about how to build and run the Java Language Server from source code, as well as instructions for contributing to its development.
JDT Language Server was created by Typefox, a company whose mission is to create tools for better software development experience. JDT itself was formerly inside Eclipse but now lives on GitHub as an open source project. We are very excited to see Microsoft collaborate with Typefox in this way and we hope it leads to a very rich ecosystem around Java on VS Code and other editors that support LSP!
We are going to start off by looking at the Hello World program.
This is the most basic program that you can possibly write in any programming language.
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main (String[] args) {
System.out.println(“Hello World”);
}
}
So first thing we will look at is the public class HelloWorld. You need a public class to write any code, so it is imperative to know what this does. In Java, every .Java file must have a class with the same name as your file, and be public. This is so that when you create a new object out of this class, it knows which one to grab from your directory of files.
Now let’s look at the main method. The main method has 3 parts:
1) public static void main (String[] args) – This is where you declare what type of method this is (static), what your parameters are if any, and what your return type is (void). We will cover these later on in more depth. For now just know that ALL programs must have a main method with these same parameters or they will not work!
2) { – This bracket opens up your methods body