I am still busy with this post. Be sure to come back soon to see the final version — and don’t be shy to post questions in the Comments — especially if I’ve missed something!
This post was written specifically for IEB IT students. If you are teaching yourself coding you may lean towards using a fully integrated development environment like Visual Studio Code with its Integrated Terminal feature.
In this tutorial:
1. Download the JDK
You need the Java Development Kit (“JDK”) — I downloaded jdk-19_windows-x64_bin.msi
from https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/downloads/#jdk19-windows. According to the download page, this is “the Java™ Platform, Standard Edition Development Kit (JDK™). The JDK is a development environment for building applications and components using the Java programming language.” [1]
2. Install the JDK
The slideshow below illustrates the installation steps. There are genuinely no tricks here and everything should proceed smoothly:
At step 4, click the Close button to finalise the installation. Click the Next Steps button to open the online documentation: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/19/index.html
3. Nothing happened!
You may well find the result quite disappointing: nothing seems to happen at all! No “Would you like to run JDK now?” option, no pretty Desktop shortcut to double-click on… silence.
Open the Windows Command Prompt and type the following at the Command Prompt to check which version of the JDK is installed:
java -version
This is what it looks like if you followed the above steps and the JDK was installed successfully:
If the JDK is not installed, you will receive the following message:
'java' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
It is really as simple as that! If you have ever configured a WAMP environment for example, you will know what a breeze this was in comparison!
4. IDE’s
An Integrated Development Environment (“IDE”) is an application that provides features to programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools and a debugger.
Examples are jGRASP, Visual Studio Code & Apache Netbeans


SCARY TECHNICAL NOTE: please be aware that if you install jGRASP, you cannot just expect the JDK to have been installed. In fact, jGRASP is bundled with OpenJDK, and it is stored in a different location — and it is not added to the system path variable.
5. Next step
Your next step should be to write your “Hello World!” program in Java.
IT students: jGRASP tutorials coming soon!
References:
- Oracle. (2022). Download the Latest Java LTS Free. Available at: https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/downloads/#jdk19-windows (Accessed: 8 December 2022).
- Wikipedia Contributors. (2023). Integrated development environment. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment (Accessed: 26 January 2023).