Java For Dummies, 9th Edition

Chapter 9

Piles of Files: Dealing with Information Overload

IN THIS CHAPTER

Using data on your hard drive

Writing code to access the hard drive

Troubleshooting input/output behavior

Consider these scenarios:

• You’re a business owner who handles hundreds of invoices each day. You store invoice data in a file on your hard drive. You need customized code to sort and classify the invoices.
• You’re an astronomer with data from scans of the night sky. When you’re ready to analyze a chunk of data, you load the chunk onto your computer’s hard drive.
• You’re the author of a popular self-help book. Last year’s fad was the Self-Mirroring Method. This year’s craze is the Make Your Cake System. You can’t modify your manuscript without converting it to the publisher’s new specifications. You need software to make the task bearable.

Each situation calls for a new computer program, and each program reads from a large data file. On top of all of that, each program creates a brand-new file containing bright, shiny results.

In previous chapters, the examples get input from the keyboard and send output to a text window. That’s fine for small tasks, but you can’t have the computer prompt you for each ...