Java Introduction and Installation

What is Java?

    Java is an Object-Oriented Programming language created in 1995 by a team led by James Gosling. It was created at Sun Microsystems, Inc. and later Sun Microsystems, Inc was acquired by Oracle Corporation.

    Java is vastly used in a wide range of applications. Some of them are:

• Mobile Application Development (Android)
• Web Applications
• Web Servers (Spring Boot)
• Desktop Applications
• Game Development

Why use Java?

• Java is easy to learn:
• It was designed to be easy to learn than other programming languages
• Java is Object-Oriented:
• Object-Oriented design let you create modular programs which are easy to maintain, and it allows you to reuse your code.
• Java is Platform-Independent:
• One of the best features of Java is being able to write a code once and use it on multiple platforms without having to worry about platform-independent differences. Eg: Windows, Linux, MacOS.
• Java is one of the most popular programming language and it has a huge community support.

What will you learn in this Java Tutorial?

    In this Java tutorial for beginners, you will learn basics of Java programming such as OOP concepts, Language Syntaxes, Command-line Arguments, Garbage Collection, Packages, Multithreading, etc. You do not need prior knowledge in programming to follow this tutorial and all the example used through the series will be uploaded to GitHub. The tutorial will be based on Java version 11, but all the examples can be used in other lower versions as well.

Java Installation

• First you need to download correct JDK installer from Oracle website. This tutorial is using Windows installer and installation process is for a Windows environment. You need to follow the same steps corresponding to your operating system.
• https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase-jdk11-downloads.html
  
• After downloading install it into a proper location on your hard drive.
• Then you need to add java bin folder path to you system path. For Windows follow this path:
• Go to Control Panel ➤ System and Security ➤ System ➤ Advanced Settings

• Then go to Advance tab and click Environment Variables at the bottom

• Now click on Path variable and click Edit

• Add the path to the bin folder inside of the JDK folder. By default, Java is installed in C:\Program Files\Java\jdk-version unless you changed it at installation time. Therefore, the path to the bin folder is C:\Program Files\Java\jdk-version\bin. Then click OK.

• Finally, open Command Prompt and type java -version and check whether or not Java has been installed on your computer correctly.

    Complete these corresponding steps in you operating system if it is not Windows. Now your computer is setup for Java Development. You will be learning Java Development in future lessons.