So, I am working on learning java and, at the same time, learn the ins and outs of a complicated IDE like Netbeans. Being an emacs person, I am unused to the level of complexity the new IDE presents.
How, using Netbeans IDE 4.0, Beta 2, do I approach the first exercise in the SAMS book? I need a walk through to show me what buttons and options to choose.
I’ll have to get back to you on this and reply from home where I have both the book and the NetBeans. Good to hear you found the book though.
I am just writing to aplologize for not yet answering this. Apparently I’m not going to get around to it at home so I’ll see what I can come up with here. In short, I don’t konw much. I know that when I open a new “file” or whatever it’s called in NetBeans I get a dialog box that asks me where I want to put it. I assume that if I’m working on a big project I would want to put all those files in the same place. So far we’re just doing one file at a time so put it anywhere. After that the only real things I know how to do with the interface are compiling and running. You can just use the drop-down menus at the top to do that. I’ll reply from home with the exact commands. The output of the program is displayed in a little window at the bottom of the GUI. You can also play around with the dedebugger features, also from the drop-down to step through the program as it runs.
To be honest, I haven’t felt the need to play around with it much after the first chapter. The examples so far are so simple that it didn’t seem worth my time to type them in and run them. I’ve just started Chapter 6 btw, so I hope I’m not too far ahead of you. I’m 90% sticking to my plan to take it slow and read it all, but I have skimmed over a few things. It looks like by Chapter 8 or 9 there will be some interesting stuff with learning how to use their graphics package.