Java Reference
In-Depth Information
I would urge you to install the SDK even if you do use one or other of the interactive development
environments that are available. The SDK provides an excellent reference environment that you can use to
check out problems that may arise. Not only that, your programs will only consist of the code that you write
plus the classes from the Java libraries that you use. Virtually all commercial Java development systems
provide pre-built facilities of their own to speed development. While this is very helpful for production
program development, it really does get in the way when you are trying to learn Java.
A further consideration is that the version of Java supported by a commercial Java product is not always
the most recent. This means that some features of the latest version of Java just won't work. If you really
do prefer to work with a commercial Java development system for whatever reason, and you have
problems with running a particular example from the topic, try it out with the SDK. The chances are it
will work OK.
To make use of the SDK you will need a plain text editor. Any editor will do as long as it does not
introduce formatting codes into the contents of a file. There are quite a number of shareware and
freeware editors around that are suitable, some of which are specific to Java, and you should have no
trouble locating one. I find the JCreator editor is particularly good. There's a free version and a fee
version with more functionality but the free version is perfectly adequate for learning. You can
download a free copy from
http://www.jcreator.com
. A good place to start looking if you want to
explore what is available is the
http://www.download.com
web site.
Installing the SDK
You can obtain detailed instructions on how to install the SDK for your particular operating system
from the Sun web site, so I won't go into all the variations for different systems here. However, there are
a few things to watch out for that may not leap out from the pages of the installation documentation.
First of all, the SDK and the documentation are separate and you install them separately. The SDK for
Windows is distributed as a
.exe
file that you just execute to start installation. The documentation for
the SDK consists of a large number of HTML files structured in a hierarchy that are distributed in a ZIP
archive. You will find it easier to install the SDK first, followed by the documentation. If you install the
SDK to drive
C:
under Windows, the directory structure shown in the diagram will be created.
