Hour 2. Writing Your First Program

As you learned during Hour 1, "Becoming a Programmer," a computer program is a set of instructions that tell a computer what to do. These instructions are prepared in the same way instructions could be given to a person: You type them into a word processor. However, that's where the similarity ends. Instructions given to a computer must be written using a programming language. Dozens of computer programming languages have been created; you might have heard of some of them, such as BASIC or Pascal.

During this hour, you will create your first Java program by entering it using any word processor you like. When that's done, you will save the program, compile it, and test it out. The following topics will be covered during this hour:

• Entering a program into a word processor

• Naming a Java program with the class statement

• Organizing a program with bracket marks

• Storing information in a variable

• Displaying the information stored in a variable

• Saving a program

• Compiling a program

• Running a program

• Fixing errors