Summary

This chapter introduced you to the use of the IntelliJ development environment, which is the basic tool that will be used throughout the book. Many of IntelliJ's features are common in other tools, along with the language used in menus and the overall programming interface.

You have seen some basic aspects of Java's syntax: how classes are defined, how code is nested inside curly braces, and how semicolons end each one of the commands. Comments help make the code more readable, both for others with whom you may collaborate and for yourself when reviewing your code in the future.

The primitive types offer a collection of possible variable types to be used in your programs to carry data, store the results of operations, and transfer information between different blocks of code.

All examples in this chapter are built from modifying an initial example that we used as a point of departure: "hello world"—that is, printing a string on the CLI. In later chapters, you will learn how to create your own classes from scratch, name them according to your needs, and store them in different folders. The next chapter will specifically cover statements in Java that control the flow of the programs.