Java 7 for Absolute Beginners

C H A P T E R  3

Data Types

Most programming languages have data types. Java has several data types. The first characteristic of a data type is whether it's a primitive or an object. Anything that's not a primitive is an object of some sort.

Primitive Data Types

Primitive means that no class exists to define a variable of that type. Java supports a number of primitive data types. In the code samples in previous chapters, you saw several variables whose data types were primitive. Anywhere you saw int or boolean, those were primitive data types (usually called “primitives”). Primitives fall into several broad categories. From the language's point of view, the categories don't exist, but they do help people keep the primitives straight from one ...