Re:Java for Everything
by twic on Sunday November 30, 2014 @06:18PM
(#8678633)
You need a compiler and an editor. That's it.
Your package manager will get you the compiler (probably as part of a package for the whole JDK).
You can use whatever editor you already like. It'll help if it has some support for Java's syntax, like highlighting or whatever.
If you want to add one non-essential tool, it should probably be a build tool that knows how to download libraries and compile your code against them. Gradle is the only sensible choice right now - it's far from perfect, but it should be tolerable. Again, your package manager will probably have Gradle. You only need it on the development (and CI) machine, not on the target.
At some point, you should probably give an IDE a go, to see how useful automatic refactoring is. Eclipse and IntelliJ are both free and pretty good (IntelliJ has free and paid versions, but the free version has everything you'll need to begin with). People love to argue over which is better, but the truth is that there's not a massive gap between them. Any IDE takes some getting used to, so it's probably better to start with a straightforward editor rather than an IDE.
If you want to use IntelliJ on the Mac, you might need to edit its Info.plist file to allow it to use a current version of Java. For some reason it's pinned to 1.6 by default. Gets me every time.
I can't think of anything you need to do to use Java that is remotely sysadminish, unless you count installing packages.
It's been years since i've read a Java book. Back when i did, by far the best was Just Java. Thinking In Java was also great. However, those were last revised 10 and 8 years ago respectively, so possibly not worth picking up today. They certainly won't tell you anything about the rather crucial new stuff in Java 8.
Your package manager will get you the compiler (probably as part of a package for the whole JDK).
You can use whatever editor you already like. It'll help if it has some support for Java's syntax, like highlighting or whatever.
If you want to add one non-essential tool, it should probably be a build tool that knows how to download libraries and compile your code against them. Gradle is the only sensible choice right now - it's far from perfect, but it should be tolerable. Again, your package manager will probably have Gradle. You only need it on the development (and CI) machine, not on the target.
At some point, you should probably give an IDE a go, to see how useful automatic refactoring is. Eclipse and IntelliJ are both free and pretty good (IntelliJ has free and paid versions, but the free version has everything you'll need to begin with). People love to argue over which is better, but the truth is that there's not a massive gap between them. Any IDE takes some getting used to, so it's probably better to start with a straightforward editor rather than an IDE.
If you want to use IntelliJ on the Mac, you might need to edit its Info.plist file to allow it to use a current version of Java. For some reason it's pinned to 1.6 by default. Gets me every time.
I can't think of anything you need to do to use Java that is remotely sysadminish, unless you count installing packages.
It's been years since i've read a Java book. Back when i did, by far the best was Just Java. Thinking In Java was also great. However, those were last revised 10 and 8 years ago respectively, so possibly not worth picking up today. They certainly won't tell you anything about the rather crucial new stuff in Java 8.