Java 6 Illuminated: An Active Learning Approach, 2nd Edition

Introduction

Up to now, whenever our programs needed data, we have supplied that

data using one of several different methods:

■

Assigning values to variables in our program. This is known as

hard coding the values of variables.

■

Prompting the user for values using the Scanner class.

■

Reading data from a text file using the Scanner class.

■

Prompting the user for values using a JOptionPane dialog box.

■

Generating random numbers using the Random class.

Typically, whenever we prompted the user to supply values, we asked for

one value at a time. If a program needs a large number of values, however,

prompting the user for each value will take a long time and ...