What are we comparing... it is not a number. java is such stu-..

Craig is writing a method to compare Tweets, and to fulfill the contract that implementing the Comparable interface requires.

Why override compareTo() for Tweets? There are several reasons, but probably the most important is that you can't sort Tweets unless you do.

When you override the compareTo() method for a class, here Tweets, you can basically do what you want, as long as you return a 0 if they are equal, and a positive or negative int if they are not.

Craig decided to compare them on mCreationDate, and if the dates were equal, then on mDescription.

Some built-in classes, like String, already have a compareTo() method, which allows you to sort them. But for your own classes, you have to provide your own compareTo() method.

You compare the objects by comparing a property of them. Say you have a class representing a blog post with properties like the author of the post, the title of the post, the body of the post, the date of the post, etc. Then you can compare two objects of this type by comparing the dates when they were posted. In another class you may find that a different member variable is suitable as the base of the comparison. For example, the class may represent a movie and you can base the comparison on the length of the movie or the movie's rating.

This returns a String representation of the object that is placed within -> () In other words it is a method that return an object as a String. example: public String toString(#objectGoesHere)