What you should know - Java Tutorial

- [Instructor] In order for you to be successful in this course, there's a little bit of setup on your machine that we need to do as well as some prerequisite knowledge that you need to have. This course is about securing Java-based programs. So let's talk about Java first. You will need to have an intermediate knowledge of Java to be successful in this course. If you aren't able to use base constructs in Java or understand the basic operations of the JVM, you'll want to spend some time learning more about Java. You need to have the ability to not only write code but read it. That may not sound like a big deal, but reading and comprehending code is far more difficult, I find, than writing it. You will also need to understand how to debug a running Java application. Good debugging skills often takes time to develop, but you will need to be able to do it in order to find and defeat security vulnerabilities in your code. With this course, I don't need you to be an expert at debugging, just be able to run the debugger and step through code. You will also need to be able to compile and ultimately run your Java applications. Now you will need to have a little bit of software installed on your computer to get going with the code samples in this course. First and foremost, you will need to have the JDK installed. Make sure it's a JDK and not the JRE. I'm going to be using Java 14, but you should be able to use anything greater than 11. In fact, most of the examples should be able to use anything greater than 1.8 in case you're on a corporate machine. You can either use open JDK or Oracle JDK, either should work fine. We will use Maven for a dependency management tool. You will need to have Maven installed on your machine and Apache provides some very good instructions. Now, we aren't going to go into a lot with Maven outside of simple use cases. If you want a little bit more background on Maven itself, we have a course from the library on introduction to Maven. You also should have a good Java IDE. This will make writing, reading, debugging, and running code significantly easier. Now, I will be using IntelliJ Ultimate Edition. I use their products every day for work, and for me, they make me more efficient. But you don't need IntelliJ Ultimate Edition. You can use the community edition, you can use Eclipse, or really you can use any modern IDE that you're comfortable with. So even though I'm using IntelliJ Ultimate Edition, please don't feel like you have to do the same thing. Any Java IDE will work just fine for this course.