Introduction

## The Beginning

Welcome to the introduction for the Java tutorial section! This section will describe how the course is laid out and provide a very abstract overview of what will be taught.

### Prerequisites
You are not required to know any programming or programming concepts before embarking on this tutorial course! You will be taught from the ground-up and everything used in the tutorials will be explained. However, this is a Java tutorial course, so there will be some things in this tutorial that only apply to Java and not other programming languages.

### Course Track
We will start with how a basic Java project is structured, and then from there we will learn variables, functions, and objects. Then we will start to learn object-oriented programming concepts like inheritance, abstraction, encapsulation, and polymorphism. From there we will learn how to use these concepts to create some basic terminal applications. Finally, we will go over some useful features like generics, functional programming, and multi-threading.
If none of that made sense to you, it's fine! By the end of this course, you will have learned what each thing is and how to use it!

### Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
For this course, it is recommended you set up your own development environment. All of the code examples will be embedded from `repl.it`  which is very basic online development environment used to demonstrate or draft code. We will not be teaching you how to fully set up an IDE, but there are numerous online / video tutorials to help set up one.
To set up a development environment, you must have Java installed. We will be working with Java 8 for this course, so at the very least please make sure you have Java 8 installed. You can check if you have Java installed by going to your terminal (on \*nix / Mac) or command line (on Windows) and typing the command `java -version`. If you do not have Java installed, you can install from [here](https://www.java.com/en/).
Once you have Java installed, you can now download an IDE. I personally recommend the Intellij IDE by Jetbrains. The community version of Intellij is free and can be downloaded [here](https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/). You can also use several other IDEs such as Eclipse, Netbeans, BlueJ, etc.
Once you have installed an IDE, take some time to become familiar with it. Learn how to create new projects, new directories, and new files. Even learn some of the keyboard shortcuts for the IDE as they often ease the repetitiveness of programming.

With that, you are ready to set sail on the Java adventure!