Whats the best Java IDE?
You’re learning Java from scratch, have no significant programming experience, and are using Windows. Therefore I strongly suggest your very first IDE be: notepad.exe and javac. After you’ve learned the basics of the language and are confident with defining classes and assembling them into applications, you might want to try Eclipse or Netbeans, but you really, really should learn the language without a bunch of IDE crap in the way, first. My personal favorite of all the IDEs is Together ControlCenter (or whatever Borland is calling it now that they own the thing) but it’s expensive and depends heavily on your ability to work with UML.
bingo: Part of the problem with using an IDE when you start is that to do basic tasks, you generally must use the software’s dialogues. For instance, I use Eclipse as my IDE of choice. In order to define a class, and have it integrate correctly with the build process, you *must* go through the dialogue that creates a new class. Also, if you’re just doing a hundred toy problems so that you can learn the language, you’re going to have the vast annoyance of having to start a new project for each one. Depending on your IDE, this might prove very annoying. Basically, using an IDE from the get-go is likely to weigh you down with a lot of “book keeping”, which gets in the way of exploratory programming. I agree with the general sentiment of the notepad+javac folks. However, I also agree that you should have font colorization and indentation. It *does* make life much, much easier, especially when you’re just starting out. I’m a unix boy, so I have easy access to my favorite editor, Emacs. I le
While I have respect for the “start with notepad/jEdit” camp, I’d recommend not staying there for two long. Java is an extremely verbose language, and simple things (like iterating across a collection) can be really annoying. My guess is you’re going to get frustated with lots of menial tasks. When that feeling sets in, switch to Eclipse and don’t look back. It takes care of tons of stuff you’ll get annoyed with really quickly, like importing classes, writing getters/setters, refactoring code, extracting interfaces, casting objects coming out of collections, etc etc. Eclipse is the only reason I enjoy writing Java. If I had to do it all by hand, I’d have stopped a long time ago. So don’t punish yourself. You’ll learn more starting that way, and it will help you appreciate Eclipse more, but don’t let it become a cross you have to bear. And when you switch to Eclipse, the two keystrokes you should learn first are ctrl-. (move to next error) ctrl-1 (auto-fix error). It’s awesome. Good luc
I taught an introduction to Java class earlier in the summer, and we used DrJava. It’s a “learning IDE” designed for beginners, but I find myself using it quite often. It’s a very lightweight IDE, without code completion and all of the project management stuff. What is especially neat about it is an interpreter that allows you to execute Java statements one at a time (i.e. without creating a class and a main method, etc.) and see the result instantly. I highly recommend giving it a try. It’s definitely different than most of the other tools you’ll see out there. Note that there’s also a DrJava plugin for Eclipse, if you decide to go down that path, although I wouldn’t reccomend Eclipse for someone just starting out.
You’re learning Java from scratch, have no significant programming experience, and are using Windows. Therefore I strongly suggest your very first IDE be: notepad.exe and javac. I totaly agree. Java is actualy very dependant on the locations of files, etc. And you’ll want to understand how the whole CLASSPATH thing works. The best way to do that is with a text editor (I actualy started java programming with MSDOS edit back in the day, since you could have multiple files open, unlike notepad :P) But a tool that does color coding and code completion is helpfull. I sometimes use JBuilder to edit while still compiling and running from the command line. I also agree with everyone who recommends eclipse. I’m stuck with Jbuilder because eclipse does code completion just slightly diffrently and it drives me nuts!
