Chapter Summary

The following topics were discussed in this chapter:

• basic language elements : identifiers, keywords, literals, white spaces, and comments

• primitive data types : integral, floating-point, and Boolean

• converting numbers between decimal, octal, and hexadecimal systems

• lifetime of fields and local variables

• declaration and initialization of variables, including reference variables

• usage of default values for fields

• structure of a valid Java source file

• declaration of the main() method whose execution starts the application