Java I: The Java Menace

Cooking with a friend

Coding, programming, and scripting - there are plenty of names for this activity, but they all generally mean the same thing. Programming is giving a computer instructions in a list. A computer program could be compared to a recipe. In a recipe, we have a list of steps, with specific tasks for each step.

The act of writing code could be compared to cooking with a friend. Imagine that you are reading the steps from the recipe and telling your friend what to do. Your friend doesn't know the recipe, so you have to instruct your friend for every step. The same is true with programming, except that programmers have no friends, therefore you are giving instructions to a computer.

But what do you do when you want food, don't feel like cooking, and don't have any friends available? You write a script that orders pizza for you! Don't say that you could just order pizza on the phone or the internet -- you’re an engineer! Your entire career is based on building custom solutions to problems that have already been solved.

Libraries and GitHub

Similar to how dogs can be taught tricks, computers can be taught commands and instructions, although neither dogs nor computers can fully understand English, so the commands we write have to be very specific.

The code we’ll be writing relies a little bit on code from libraries. Libraries in coding are similar to physical libraries, but rather than borrow books, you borrow code. Put simply, libraries are a collection of previously-written code. We typically get libraries from random strangers on the internet, and the most popular website to download them from is GitHub. GitHub is where programmers go to build their egos. GitHub is a website where programmers share code. I've gone out and setup the libraries for you already, so all you need to focus on is writing the code in the coding "playground", which we'll get to in just a moment.

The Goal

Before we begin the actual coding, let's quickly summarize the four things that we will need our program to be able to do:

• Know the delivery address
• Know the nearest pizza place
• Give the pizza place an order
• Give the pizza place some $$$

Continue onwards to begin the activity tutorial.