   Help with java
  For the my first year of college i am taking a course in java.  I wanted to get a head start on studying and understanding it(the basics of it at least).  My biggest problem is with compiling and executing it.  I know there is the command prompt and I found a website on how to do it.http://www.cs.princeton.edu/introcs/15inout/windows-cmd.htmlIs this the most efficient way of using the command prompt?  What do you think of using ides just as eclipse or jCreator.Thanks I am very new to java.   
  Hello,At my school, we use Dr. Java (which is sort of similar to JCreator), and it's very easy to use, and has an auto-indent feature that properly indents your entire document.It's website is here.   ;  Well, first of all I have to say out of experience that it is quite handy to use the command prompt the first few times of compiling and running so you have some knowledge about how compiling normally goes.But to answer your question: In my opinion Eclipse is the best and most effecient way of creating and compiling a Java program. The two best functions it has are the code completion, which is a great tool, and most importantly the real-time compiling in the background. So whenever you make a mistake in a statement Eclipse will already alert you with an error notice. This will safe a lot of time in the future. Besides that the real-time compiling means you don't have to do it manually after writing the program.I hope this helped you a bit.   ;  Just download and install Eclipse.  Really, it's easy to use and is actually used by a lot of industry professionals (we use it at our work for all our Java stuff).  You don't have to mess with any command line stuff.  You just write your program, press Crtl+F11 (or use your mouse to click the "run" button), and you're good to go.[edit]ninja'd by M-E   ;  Command line for your first few hello world programs, so that you know your packages from your jars and your classpaths from your library paths. After that, get Eclipse or NetBeans. Both are very powerful. Eclipse is better in terms of being able to configure help mouse-over popups for javadocs for any library (including, of course, the standard one). NetBeans has the advantage in creating user interfaces (supposedly. I've tried this function in Eclipse and it wasn't fun, but I haven't tried it in NetBeans...) and being easier and more hassle-free to setup as an environment for JavaEE - the EE version comes bundled with Glassfish and is very easy to get running, so you can be running and testing servlets in minutes. Both have all kinds of syntax / completion / highlighting / refactoring features you might expect from a modern IDE. I use Eclipse except when forced to use NetBeans, but I encourage you to try out both to see which one works best for you. They can be kind of daunting and overwhelming at first because they can do so much, so spend a couple of days exploring them.   