Welcome to the complete Java Developer Course. I'm your instructor, John Baugh. I have a Ph.D. in Computer Science. I'm a professional software engineer and consultant, and computer science professor and department chair at my primary academic institution. My students usually just call me "Dr. J". In this Getting Started section, we'll just go over some of the basics and get you set up with the right software to make your journey learning Java 8 little bit easier. One term I use throughout the course is IDE, which stands for Integrated Development Environment. An IDE consists of a bunch of tools that help us to write and run our code. One of the most important components invoked by the IDE is the compiler, which is a program that converts the programming language, in our case Java, into byte code, which is a special code format that runs on the JVM or Java Virtual Machine.

We will write Java code and then tell the IDE to run our files, part of which is compiling, which does the conversion from the Java to the bytecode. The IDE I will use throughout this course is IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition. And I will be running it and demonstrating code examples on Windows. If you aren't on Windows, then don't worry. IntelliJ is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux. The Community Edition has everything we need to get started and can even be used for commercial development. So, if you end up writing a really cool application of some sort, you can sell it without licensing issues. And you can follow along in this course even if you don't use IntelliJ. There are a lot of other great IDEs available, such as Apache NetBeans and Eclipse. This is going to be an exciting course and I'm so glad to have you along for the journey. Let's get going.