Introduction

Chapter 4 began our introduction to the types of building blocks that are available for problem solving. We used those building blocks to employ proven program-construction techniques. In this chapter, we continue our presentation of the theory and principles of structured programming by introducing Java's remaining control statements. The control statements we study here and in Chapter 4 are helpful in building and manipulating objects.

In this chapter, we demonstrate Java's for, do...while and switch statements. Through a series of short examples using while and for, we explore the essentials of counter-controlled repetition. We devote a portion of the chapter (and Chapter 7) to expanding the GradeBook class presented in Chapters 34. In particular, we create a version of class GradeBook that uses a switch statement to count the number of A, B, C, D and F grade equivalents in a set of numeric grades entered by the user. We introduce the break and continue program control statements. We discuss Java's logical operators, which enable programmers to use more complex conditional expressions in control statements. Finally, we summarize Java's control statements and the proven problem-solving techniques presented in this chapter and Chapter 4.