Every programming language comes with a learning curve, but Java shares many similarities with C, C++ and JavaScript. Anyone with experience in any of those languages will pick up Java syntax quickly.

When I first learned to program, it was grasping if statements that helped it all click into place for me. Once you can use if statements, you can build all kinds of useful and interesting tools.

Computer programs can use data, evaluate if-then conditions on the data and use extremely fast iterative loops to perform these functions. In software programs, these functions get organized into ...