printf() I am being told that this is not the usually and common thing used in Java is that correct?

Hi Ronald!

I haven't heard of printf being frowned upon, and a quick Google didn't turn up any heated debates. It's quite common to use for formatting text out to the screen. Java Basics builds up to a program in which it is used. There is such a thing as String concatenation where you combine Strings using the + but I find that leading with this often creates some actual bad practices in terms of String management, which is a little different in Java.

The reason why I start out using java.io.Console is because we are writing a console application. Some beginning courses jump right into using System.out, but as I think you can start to tell I don't like to introduce stuff until we really need it. This is in an effort to not put too much information in front of you. I think that console is a very nice light intro into input and output. One reason I believe it is not used in other beginner classes that are using an IDE based learning approach is because it is hard to override in the IDE as it is final, we have the luxury to avoid that as we are using Workspaces. Another possible reason is because it was introduced in Java SE 7, so some still have not upgraded their course content.

We will go over System.out.println in the second course in the Learn Java track which is called Java Objects and I will explain what it means. In this course it just wasn't what we were focussing on, and seemed like cognitive overload.

Eventually you'll move away from the console, and will be using loggers which use string formatting, much like printf. On the webside of things, you'll be using a templating language which also encourages you to think heavily about placeholders.

Does that help?

Ahh ok cuz you said you ntroduce it in course 2 so i thought course 2 was not out yet lol