The first thing I had to decide on was which GUI (Graphical User Interface) Environment to use with my Java experiment. As I don't know the first thing about this language, I'm not really qualified to make an informed choice about this, so after a little sniffing around I found the two most popular front-end tools seem to be Eclipse and Netbeans.
This is Eclipse...
... and this is NetBeans...
I know they look very similar, and as far as I can tell they pretty much do the same thing, so for the moment I'm leaving them both installed, hoping that if I've made the "wrong" decision as to which platform to use, I can change my mind later. If it even works like that, who knows?
Anyway, having browsed around java.com for a while, it seems that NetBeans is the GUI of choice, so that's what I'll stick with for now. If you're interested, Eclipse can be grabbed from HERE and NetBeans from HERE .
I don't know if you noticed on those pictures (which you can click on to enlarge, by the way), but my first Java code is in there. A fully working program! I have got a handle on how the structure of the language works (sort of, it's early days) and it looks a bit daunting, but manageable. Anyway, here's the code...
... and here's the resulting output...
Awesome or what ?! Now it's time to do some research...
