Getting Started

Computers essentially understand machine code which is basically an abstraction of the underlying computer architectures. In order to provide a symbolic representation of these architectures,Assembly language was created to mimic or provide an abstraction for the machine code. Assembly languages served as a small abstraction of the machine, but further "imperative" languages provided a detailed abstraction of the assembly languages, e.g., Fortran, BASIC and C. This helped in facilitating programmers with a human-comprehensible instruction set to give instructions to computers.

Although these latter languages were a big improvement over assembly languages, their primary abstraction still required you to think in terms of the structure of the computer rather than the structure of the problems that were being solved. Modern computer programming languages such as Java not only provide an abstraction for these archaic programming languages and models, but also rids the programmers of worries related to the structure, architecture and the underlying processes of a computer. Instead, programmers are encouraged to rather think in terms of solving the problems in Java. This programming model is known as object-oriented programming, and Java is one of the most recognised object-oriented programming language.

Prerequisites

For now however, you need to make sure that you are geared up to continue programming with the Java platform. Henceforth, you would need the following tools:

1. A text editor: Java files are plain text files. Any text editor that helps you create files with unformatted text will do. Notepad is a good option. A freeware program called Notepad++ provides more features: it will color-code the code that you write and help you organize it.
2. Java compiler: You need a Java compiler to compile your source code into byte-code.
3. Java virtual machine: You need a Java virtual machine to interpret the byte-code for your computer's native architecture.