Java 7 for Absolute Beginners

CHAPTER 5 ■ CONTROL FLOW, LOOPING, AND BRANCHING

Summary

This chapter covered what many programmers consider to be the main purpose of programming:
identifying conditions and doing appropriate things for each one. If we have no ability to change what
we do based on the inputs we receive, no program could achieve the complexity to do anything useful.
To that end, every programming language offers at least a few ways to change paths within the code.
As we learned in this chapter, Java offers:

• if and if-else (and else if) statements, for simple comparisons


• switch blocks, for comparing lots of values


• for (and enhanced for or “for each”) loops, for easy-to-read looping


• while loops, for when we want to do something until a condition is met


• do-while loops, for when we want to have the test come last


• break statements, for jumping out of the current block


• continue statements, for moving on to the next item


• return statements, for saying we're done with this method and returning a value

Thanks to all these possibilities for controlling the flow of our logic, we can write programs that can
handle any number of inputs and outputs and intermediate processing steps correctly and still be easy-
to-read.