Can anyone explain this line to me please: public static void main (String [] arg) {}

He explains it later in the course but i will give you a quick summary of what that means so you can relax your curious itchy mind :)

alright lets break this down:

• public static void main (String [] args) {}: this whole thing is the main method of your program, this method is what the launcher looks for in your entire project and where your program is launched from, basically your starting point of execution.

• public: this is the accessibility declarator marking from where in your project you have access to this method. read this for more on access control https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/javaOO/accesscontrol.html

• static: this keyword marks your method as being accessible even without creating an instance of the class. Maybe you're familiar with how normally, when you wanna use a method on an object from a class outside of the one you are coding in, you have to create an instance of that object and call the method on the object like so: Scanner myScanner = new Scanner(System.in); and then you can call methods on the object to execute them like so: myScanner.nextLine(); Well, there are methods on classes which you can access without creating an instance of those and instead just call the method on the class itself. The java.lang.Math class is a perfect example of this. It contains nothing but those so called static methods so you can just say for example Math.abs(-8) and that will return the absolute value of -8 which is 8. You see, here you're calling the method .abs() directly on the class Math without creating an instance of said class by calling a constructor like you normally would. This works only if the method is marked with the keyword 'static'.

• void: this keyword marks the method's return type and void means that it doesn't return anything. So, for example that last method I was talking about on the Math class called .abs() does not have return type void it actually has the return type 'int' (which is what you get out of it in case you give it an 'int' as its parameter, you can give it something else aswell which will call a different method with the same name but with a different return type, accepted parameters for .abs() are int, float, double and long, this isn't that important though). You can make a method return any object you wan't even objects that are instances of classes you created yourself.

• main(): this is just the name of the method the launcher looks for to set the starting point from where to run your program.

• (String [] args) read-> String array (called) arguments: this is the parameter the method takes, you can think of this as a sort of initial setting your program starts with, so for example if you know how to run a program from a command prompt you could call the main method with an array of strings like so: main("strawberry", "banana", "cream cheese") and then you could set what to do with those values but normally your program starts without any arguments, which is fine. Wouldn't worry too much about this one, you're not gonna get confronted with it for quite a while.

hope this sets your mind to ease

stay curious, keep digging deep, make sure you understand and don't just learn to repeat what you're told :)

happy coding and lot's of success

Matthias