Whitespace

The layout of code is another area where you and your team should adhere to standards. Whitespace includes spaces, tab characters, form feeds, and new lines (produced by pressing the enter key). Whitespace is required between certain elements and is optional between others. For example, there must be at least one space between the keyword class and the name of the class in a class declaration:

 class Student 

And the following spacing is allowable (but avoided):

 String studentName = student   .   getName(); 

The Java compiler ignores extra whitespace. You should use spaces, tabs, and blank lines to judiciously organize your code. This goes a long way toward allowing easy future understanding of the code.

The examples in this book provide a consistent, solid and generally accepted way of formatting Java code. If your code looks like the examples, it will compile. It will also meet the standards of most Java development shops. You will want to decide on things such as whether to use tabs or spaces for indenting and how many characters to indent by (usually three or four).