The Bukkit plugins that we will program will be written in the Java programming language. I am assuming that you already have basic knowledge of Java. If this is not the case or you find yourself not understanding parts of this book, then I suggest you visit codisimus.com/learnjava, which has an introduction to the Java language and information on various concepts that you will need to know in order to create good plugins throughout the course of this book.

We will use an IDE to write the plugins. An IDE is an Integrated Development Environment and it is the software that will aid us in writing the Java code. It has many tools and features that make programming much easier. For example, it automatically detects errors in our code, it often tells us how to fix these errors or even does it for us, and it provides us with many shortcuts, such as one keystroke to compile our code and build a jar, so that the code can be executed. In this chapter we will download and install an IDE, and prepare it for creating a new Bukkit plugin. We will cover the following topics and by the end of this chapter we will have written our first plugin which will be ready to test on our server.