Should I learn Java using IDE from the start?

[Andrew Morgan]

Should I use IDE from the start or ir's better to start just with JDK?
I got this book by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates and it advises me to better not start with IDE.
Would like to hear some opinions from experinced devs
Thank you

[Carey Brown]

I definitely recommend setting IDEs aside for a future date and use the command line to begin with. You will learn how a project is structured, compiled, and run in ways that gives you a fundamental understanding so that things make more sense when you do move to an IDE. IDEs have their own learning curve and it's best not to heap that on top of the already jam packed  Java learning curve.

With command line development use a plain text editor; Notepad is one option but many people prefer Notepad++ which has syntax highlighting.

Come back here  if you get stuck.

[Carey Brown]

For future reference:
Based on my casual observation it seems that Eclipse is the most preferred IDE though there are a couple of others.  In my 25 year career all of the companies I worked for used Eclipse.

[Andrew Morgan]

Will def keep that in mind
Appreciate your reply and help

[Liutauras Vilda]

Perhaps it won't last long (terminal), and you'll start using IDE, however, spend the time understanding mechanics of compiling classes and running them.
Terminal is something you'd use more later when you get more experience anyway.

[Liutauras Vilda]

Carey Brown wrote:For future reference:
Based on my casual observation it seems that Eclipse is the most preferred IDE though there are a couple of others.  In my 25 year career all of the companies I worked for used Eclipse.

That's not the case in my experience. However, I like companies which don't insist what tools to use, so you can choose whichever IDE you like.

[Lou Hamers]

I'm not really sure what the best way to learn is. Maybe it varies for everyone?

I started with a DOS based Borland IDE (essentially a text based UI), if you don't count messing around with QBASIC or whatever (I think that was the name). Later I moved on to Visual Studio (C++) and then I think Eclipse/Java followed. I don't remember any especially difficult learning curve any step of the way.

If you do start with an IDE, many will do the work of setting up a decent project structure, so you start off seeing better practices.

I'm not sure I'd call them distracting or confusing either. It could distract if you start digging into all the features, but considering that you can install it, choose a project type and within seconds have something set up and running for you to experiment with, it might be less frustrating.

[Lou Hamers]

Carey Brown wrote:For future reference:
Based on my casual observation it seems that Eclipse is the most preferred IDE though there are a couple of others.  In my 25 year career all of the companies I worked for used Eclipse.

This turned into kind of a "opinion after years in the trenches" narrative but I promise I get back to the original topic by the end.  

Eclipse is definitely the most common in my own experience too. I used it for maybe 10 years. But all the bugs and quirks started getting old. Then I decided I need a "dark mode" UI, something that Eclipse is simply incapable of doing well (even today), and I had to dump it for NetBeans. NetBeans is pretty good actually, so now I prefer that over Eclipse. Unfortunately once I decided to make the jump from Ant to Gradle (I never cared for Maven), I found NetBeans Gradle support lacking. IntelliJ (even the free version) turned out to do a far better job with Gradle (and other things), so much so that I ended up subscribing to JetBrains entire suite of products (they have a bundle where you get EVERYTHING).

Now after having used all 3 IDEs for a number of years, going from IJ to Eclipse is PAINFUL.

Eclipse is good to learn if you're new because it's common. But I feel it's such a horrible experience that I only recommend it with the caveat that you should try out alternatives once you've become familiar enough that you're comfortable using it.

So maybe start out without an IDE for a short time to learn the under-the-hood basics. I personally wouldn't spend more than 1-4 weeks at most like that. Then try Eclipse and get familiar enough that you're comfortable with it. At that point branch out and check out NetBeans and IntelliJ (or if you just hate Eclipse right from day one start with another, just make sure you come back to learn Eclipse because employers love it for some reason).

[Paul Anilprem]

You can definitely use an IDE if that helps you get started quickly if you are beginner. Using an IDE does feel more exciting than using the command line.
But if you decide to prepare for any Java certification, it is advisable to spend a good amount of time in learning how to do things from the command line for reasons explained here.

[Tim Holloway]

Back to the top, yes, we recommend something like Notepad as your first "IDE". Learning an IDE is a complex task in and of itself, so it's better to learn your way around the Java Universe and then augment it with an IDE once you're ready to go industrial-scale. Starting from an IDE is likely to be a problem not only because you have to learn the IDE, but if you use "wizards" to build your Java code without actually learning what that code does, you can get into big trouble when you start to enhance and debug it.

There are 3 major IDEs, plus some lesser known ones. They are Eclipse, NetBeans, and IntelliJ. All have their proponents and each has unique attractions. NetBeans started out life under a different name as a Sun product, and has often been used by Sun/Oracle to illustrate concepts. IntelliJ excels at helping people get routine tasks done. Eclipse is actually a general-purpose OSGi framework and while the Java and Enterprise Java spins are the most popular, there are also Eclipse spins for things like C development.

I favor Eclipse because it can handle complex run environments like debugging both a client and server concurrently. But for the average programmer, I'd generally recommend IntelliJ.

IntelliJ is a commercial product, but you can often get it free-to-cheap under various promotions (Eclipse is free. Open Source). One way to get IntelliJ for free is to download and install the Google Android Developer kit, as it has a copy of IntelliJ bundled with it. While it's primarily for developing for Dalvik, and (as a free benefit, Kotlin), I'm pretty sure it also will let you install a standard JDK as an option.

[Carey Brown]

I bet "free/open source" is a big reason Eclipse spread so rapidly.

[Tim Holloway]

I should have noted also that many IT shops mandate a specific IDE for either the entire IT department or at least the one you're in, so if you have a specific work environment in mind, find out what they use. Eclipse project meta-data differs considerably from what IntelliJ uses and likewise for NetBeans. So you cannot just suck an Eclipse project into IntelliJ or vice versa.

[Liutauras Vilda]

Tim Holloway wrote:Eclipse project meta-data differs considerably from what IntelliJ uses and likewise for NetBeans. So you cannot just suck an Eclipse project into IntelliJ or vice versa.

About metadata differences agree, but not sure about the rest. Those metadata files are specific to your local environment, not project in general. You should be able to import project to an IDE. Well, at least you can to the IDE (IntelliJ IDEA) I use.

A good example is CodeRanch's JForum, I saw some devs pushed some Eclipse config files, however, my IDE doesn't use them, and understand project by the build tool, i.e. Maven, Gradle. If these are not being used, you can still configure project with some manual input.

[Tim Holloway]

IntelliJ has 3 project files, as I recall, each in XML format. One for the project itself, one for personal preferences, and I think the third contains current editing state (it has been a while since I looked). When committing to a source archive, the personal stuff should not commit, only the global project file.

Eclipse uses 2 files and a subdirectory. The ".project" file defines the project, the ".classpath" file defines the test and live classpaths, and the ".settings" directory holds preference files and plugin-metadata. These files are also generally in XML format.

The naming and use of both project filesets is non-overlapping, so it is perfectly possible to have both IntelliJ and Eclipse project info in the same project directory without conflict, although changes to project settings in one IDE won't update the project settings in the other. They're simply unaware of any such files.

I won't vouch for NetBeans, as I haven't worked with it in recent history.

If a project is Maven-based, there are Maven goals that can build the above files. For Eclipse, the goal is "eclipse:eclipse" and for IntelliJ, it is (if memory serves) "intellij:intellij". For best results run these goals when their respective IDE is not running so that they will get picked up the next time the IDE launches.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Tim Holloway wrote:. . . we recommend something like Notepad . . .

Agree with those who said to use a text editor, but I wouildn't use MS Notepad. Use NotePad2 or NotePad++ if you are onWindows® because they support additional features to improve your code formatting. The two apps are related but NotePad++ has more features.

[Campbell Ritchie]

. . . and Welcome to the Ranch

[Lou Hamers]

Carey Brown wrote:I bet "free/open source" is a big reason Eclipse spread so rapidly.

I don't know, wasn't NetBeans also free and open from the start? It's also older.

I'm sure that's a factor why Eclipse is more popular than IntelliJ today. A lot of people don't seem to realize that IntelliJ also has a totally free Community Edition too now (not OSS, but most people aren't contributing anyway). That wasn't always the case. (You'd probably want to disable the horrible VS Code copycat "new UI" from the start though. If you want a "minimal" UI like that which displays little info and hides functionality, you may as well just use the real VS Code...?)

[Mike Simmons]

I think Eclipse also benefited from the fact that IBM put a decent amount of work into it before it was released to the public, and the early versions were pretty good by the standards of the day.  So it was appealing to many people from early on.  I don't know how true that was of NetBeans; the few times I looked at it I never saw something that kept me coming back.

Eclipse also cultivated a strong 3rd-party-plugin support culture from early on - which also ties into the free/open point.  So a lot of plugins were available.  Those plugins weren't always compatible, of course, and finding that out could be an adventure in itself...

In comparison, IntelliJ IDEA initially concentrated on making the basic code editing experience as smooth as possible.  Without necessarily having all the bells and whistles of the plugins.  Those came later, as far as I recall.

[Liutauras Vilda]

Tim Holloway wrote:IntelliJ has 3 project files, as I recall, each in XML format. One for the project itself, one for personal preferences, and I think the third contains current editing state (it has been a while since I looked). When committing to a source archive, the personal stuff should not commit, only the global project file.

Hm... it may depend on the project specifics and expectations you have. Our team never committed a single file that is under .idea dir and don't remember having a single problem. And that's not just one project, on many different projects, however, they are using either Maven or Gradle (if that's Java based project), and IntelliJ is capable of parsing those and replicating some of those you mentioned. IntelliJ also is quite good at recognising what plugins you may want to install when it scans the project based on the file types. But we don't have hard requirements on any 3rd party plugins.

But ok, your projects might be quite different. If there is something that requires some knowing, i.e. some remote debugging configs or so we normally write a small wiki, which I think potentially would reside in those IDE specific project settings. So yes, technically you are right, but can be avoided and not coupled with specific IDE files. And that's been the case for us, developers are free to use tools they are comfortable and want.

[Mike Simmons]

Yeah, I become extremely suspicious of any build that depends on any IDE-specific tools.  Largely because of some Eclipse-plugin-specific experiences many years ago.  But if the project can't be reliably built from the command line outside any IDE, that's a huge red flag for me.  As a result, I am suspicious of any IDE-specific file that gets checked in.  Though theoretically some may be things that merely enhance the experience for that particular IDE, which wouldn't be a problem.  I guess I'm reflexively paranoid about that stuff.

[Lou Hamers]

Mike Simmons wrote:Yeah, I become extremely suspicious of any build that depends on any IDE-specific tools.  Largely because of some Eclipse-plugin-specific experiences many years ago.  But if the project can't be reliably built from the command line outside any IDE, that's a huge red flag for me.  As a result, I am suspicious of any IDE-specific file that gets checked in.

Absolutely 100%, I don't like seeing that at all. But it's very common, and a lot of older projects need it if you don't want to make setting up a new developer harder. Nobody ever seems to want to get rid of the technical debt that makes a build trashy.

I try to get my project builds to be as automatic and IDE agnostic as possible. You should be able to clone from git and do a 'gradle run' from a CLI, or import the thing into an IDE with decent Gradle support, and it should just run. Or at least come as close as possible to that.

[Tim Holloway]

Mike Simmons wrote:Yeah, I become extremely suspicious of any build that depends on any IDE-specific tools.

Long-time sufferers here may recall that I've recounted more than once about the wonderful time I got called into work around 3am for something that needed a 1-line fix in Visual C++.

But to implement the fix, I had to install an ancient version of Visual Studio and apply ancient maintenance while panic was in progress and for a while it looked like to run the ancient Visual Studio I'd also have to wipe a system disk, install an ancient copy of Windows and apply ancient maintenance.

That was the beginning of my insistence on being able to build all production from a non-IDE command line as well as the beginning of my abandonment of Windows as a development platform.

In truth, though, Microsoft was also making different and incompatible "make" utilities back then as well. Talk about building castles and watching them sink into the swamp!

[Stephan van Hulst]

I'm just here to show my support for NetBeans.

Sure, there are some annoying things about it (for some reason, the copy-paste feature keeps breaking when the IDE has been running for a few hours), but I very much prefer it over Eclipse. Mostly, I love the fact that most of my Maven projects don't require additional IDE-specific configuration files. NetBeans attempts to retrieve as much information from the POM as possible, and only in special cases does it add an nbproject or nbactions file.

To me, Eclipse has just been a hot mess from the very start, and even recent attempts of mine to try it again haven't left me impressed. I'm sure it's much more flexible and powerful than NetBeans is, but I'm thinking it's exactly this flexibility that makes me go yuck every time I use it.

I've never given IntelliJ a fair chance. From what I can tell from a distance, it would have a good chance of becoming a favoured IDE of mine, but I just don't have any reason to invest time in it.

I'm not against beginners using an IDE to start with as much as I used to, but I still campaign for them to start with just the command line tool and a text editor. The reason for this is that once programmers get used to their IDE, they no longer feel the need or desire to learn about the command line tools. I consider a good handle on the compiler to be an essential skill for an intermediate to senior Java developer. If you don't know how to compile a small project by hand, I don't want you maintaining a large one.

[Adrian Grabowski]

By all means use a simple text editor and command line at the very beginning. It's probably also useful to learn Maven (later on) by only using command line so you'll understand what's going on. But don't spend too much time doing that. Switch to an IDE as soon as you cover the basics. A very simple one is BlueJ (not used in the real world but quite good for learning OOP concepts), then you have NetBeans (still quite easy to use), Eclipse (slow and buggy but many people love it so try it) and, my favourite - IntelliJ (that's also the most popular one).

[Tim Holloway]

Eclipse is "slow and buggy"??? About the only bug I've been annoyed by is in the XML editor plugin and at least when it comes to start-up, IntelliJ wins the slow prize.

I do see some slow when Eclipse is scanning and rebuilding an entire workspace (which it does only rarelt), but my workspace is pretty large.

[Liutauras Vilda]

Tim Holloway wrote:Eclipse is "slow and buggy"??? About the only bug I've been annoyed by is in the XML editor plugin and at least when it comes to start-up, IntelliJ wins the slow prize.

Tim, my experience is opposite. I stopped using Eclipse about 10 years go, one of the reasons being - very sluggish, couldn't smoothly handle couple of simple HelloWorld projects opened at the same time. And I remember hearing at that time people saying what you are saying about IntelliJ IDEA. I don't know if it is because of macOS (Mac OS X at that time), but IntelliJ IDEA for me was very smooth compared to Eclipse.

Then one other thing what used to annoy me, that Eclipse didn't have any reasonable "Search in project" functionality, so had to download plugin called something similar to "Quick Search", I think this, and then some other plugin for something else, and then someone advised to upgrade straight to Spring ToolSuite (STS), so IDE would meet minimal basic requirements for a day-to-day use, then everything become even more sluggish, and then I ditched it.

Even though IntelliJ IDEA is a great at recognising project structure and has no problems building projects after importing, I rarely building that way, like others said, like to use terminal for building <-- which by the way is also integrated into IDE whoever prefers that and not terminal natively bundled with OS.

I used git also extensively in terminal, but lately switched to IDEA's, the diff tool in particular is absolutely amazing, and I find myself being more comfortable that way. On the other hand, now there is a lot of other frameworks/plugins like oh-my-zsh for the terminal, which can vastly improve experience and integration with many tools on command line. Some tools are just better on command line, one of which these days couldn't live without is k9s. But this topic is just snowballs.

[Chris Smithtopher]

I can't speak to others' experiences, but my own is that even universities and most tutorials these days skip right to IDEs for learning and development. I trust a lot of the oldheads (learned that term today :P) in here, and the tip about using command line to prepare for certs seems poignant.

How do you manage things like packages, dependencies, and all that jazz? Should I worry about that now, or just focus on getting familiar with non-IDE coding?

[Carey Brown]

Chris Smithtopher wrote:How do you manage things like packages, dependencies, and all that jazz?

...you should probably have already started your IDE learning curve before getting too deep into dependencies. Packages you should be able to do from the command line.

[Ron McLeod]

I tried to use IntelliJ around 5 years but gave-up because of performance issues on the platforms where I wanted to run it.  My impression at that time was that it really needed to have something like 16GB of RAM, multiple CPU cores (4?), and SSD storage to work well on largish projects, which often wasn't available in development environments/workflows; so I stuck with Eclipse.

A few years back I switched VSCode for development at my day job and for home projects.  I typically work in development environments with relatively lightweight workstations but highly-resourced development servers.  What really works well for me is that with VSCode, I can split the IDE frontend and backend functionalities, allowing me to run the frontend on my local workstation, and the run the more resource-intensive work on the remote servers.

I know a lot of people love to hate on MS, but I use it everyday for JavaSE/Jakarta/Microprofile, JS/TS/HTML/CSS, and C/C++ projects and I am very productive using it and have very few complaints.

[Liutauras Vilda]

Carey Brown wrote:

Chris Smithtopher wrote:How do you manage things like packages, dependencies, and all that jazz?

...you should probably have already started your IDE learning curve before getting too deep into dependencies. Packages you should be able to do from the command line.

And so the dependencies, there are examples on those cert books how to set the classpath.

A one or two examples where class depends on few other to get it compiled and be able to run is a good start, and perhaps indeed don't need to dive significantly more, but just to get a sense what's happening.

[Chris Smithtopher]

Carey Brown wrote:

Chris Smithtopher wrote:How do you manage things like packages, dependencies, and all that jazz?

...you should probably have already started your IDE learning curve before getting too deep into dependencies. Packages you should be able to do from the command line.

Alright, so dependencies I won't touch, and I'll figure out how to do packages from CMD. Like I said, I wasn't really taught this stuff, and a lot of my learning has unfortunately be fraught with misdirection and lack of structure, despite studying at a college. Just trying to make sure I get the right bearing before I go off down another path, only to realize I've missed something.

Thanks!

[Chris Smithtopher]

Liutauras Vilda wrote:

Carey Brown wrote:

Chris Smithtopher wrote:How do you manage things like packages, dependencies, and all that jazz?

...you should probably have already started your IDE learning curve before getting too deep into dependencies. Packages you should be able to do from the command line.

And so the dependencies, there are examples on those cert books how to set the classpath.

A one or two examples where class depends on few other to get it compiled and be able to run is a good start, and perhaps indeed don't need to dive significantly more, but just to get a sense what's happening.

Sounds good, I appreciate it!

[Lou Hamers]

Liutauras Vilda wrote:

Tim Holloway wrote:Eclipse is "slow and buggy"??? About the only bug I've been annoyed by is in the XML editor plugin and at least when it comes to start-up, IntelliJ wins the slow prize.

Tim, my experience is opposite. I stopped using Eclipse about 10 years go, one of the reasons being - very sluggish, couldn't smoothly handle couple of simple HelloWorld projects opened at the same time. And I remember hearing at that time people saying what you are saying about IntelliJ IDEA. I don't know if it is because of macOS (Mac OS X at that time), but IntelliJ IDEA for me was very smooth compared to Eclipse

Same here, IIRC slowness is one of the reasons I ditched it for NB and later IJ. Maybe it depends on HW specs, but Eclipse is not exactly "slim". Possibly the type of project being built and/or settings/plugins in play? I still like NetBeans a lot (not so much their Gradle support) but IntelliJ is just awesome, and I've never thought of it as slow. It will eat your RAM if you let it (this is Java...), but I buy that stuff to use it, not to brag about it. IJ has a "memory use" setting that I think I've had to tweak before. Most of us know how a JVM behaves once it's low on memory... maybe that setting just needs an increase sometimes.

IJ seems to be common at developer trainings/conferences (not a strong argument, just an observation of what a lot of experienced trainers use). Then again Macs are common too, so maybe their judgement is questionable after all...  

Bugs... all IDEs have them. But I feel like Eclipse takes it to an extreme! I think just a few weeks ago (I'm forced to use it still sometimes) I was seeing some NPE in a popup or a log, and it wasn't from application code.  

[Tim Holloway]

Eclipse itself is fairly slim — it's an OSGi container. But Eclipse full of plugins that make it into a Java IDE, C/C++ IDE, Python IDE or whatever (or several at once). They do add up. And I'll admit that even today, initial startup is hardly instantaneous (though faster than my Android phone rebooting!)

But, as I said before, I like the fact that I can debug both ends of a client-server system at the same time, and, in fact, multiple clients and multiple servers all chattering to each other. Most developers aren't as evil as I am.

Regardless, we all know the One True IDE is Emacs. And yes, I've used it with the Java development plugin.

[Lou Hamers]

Tim Holloway wrote:
Regardless, we all know the One True IDE is Emacs. And yes, I've used it with the Java development plugin.

There's always one around who enjoys pain! j/k lol

[Stephan van Hulst]

Tim Holloway wrote:But, as I said before, I like the fact that I can debug both ends of a client-server system at the same time, and, in fact, multiple clients and multiple servers all chattering to each other. Most developers aren't as evil as I am.

I've had to do this as well, and NetBeans had no problem doing it. But maybe the scenarios I've been working with haven't been as evil as yours have.

[Lou Hamers]

Pretty sure all 3 IDEs can do that stuff. IJ even has this weird "remote development" thing, which apparently is running an IDE instance on another machine. I have no idea why you would do this but apparently enough people were interested in it. And nope I'm not confusing it with just connecting to a remote server port for debugging etc (all 3 can do that):

[Mike Simmons]

This goes with my previous comments about 3rd-party plugins.  As I recall there were various times I had to remote debug with something like WebSphere or I forget what other products, and plugins existed to assist with this in Eclipse, but not IntelliJ.  (At the time.). So remote debugging would push you towards Eclipse.  Later, by the time IntelliJ had split into free and premium versions, IntelliJ was making sure the premium version would have all the plugins you were likely to need.  And many are now available in the free version as well.  So now, it's easy to remote debug with Intellij - but that wasn't always the case.

[Lou Hamers]

Yeah IJ is definitely much better if you buy it, I won't deny that at all.

But I don't understand why devs are so CHEAP. Unless you're in school or something, we get paid pretty well (and students get discounts).. so why is almost nobody willing to spend a little on quality tools that they use almost daily to make a living? If that's not important enough to fund it, what is?

Open source is great and when it's the best option I go for those, but sometimes you get what you pay for, too. This also brings to mind the problems with commonly used open source stuff not being financially supported (leading to things like the recent XZ Utils issue and so on due to a lack of maintainers)... we need to be a little less cheap, IMO.