5.1 Introduction

Experience has shown that the best way to develop and maintain a large program is to construct it from small, simple pieces. This technique is called divide and conquer. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to declare and use methods to facilitate the design, implementation, operation and maintenance of large programs.

Previously, you’ve called methods on specific objects—for example, method nextInt on Scanner objects and methods printf, print and println on the System.out object. You’ll see that it’s possible for certain methods, called static methods, to be called on a class rather than on an object. You’ll learn how to declare static methods, then call them from other methods (such as main). You’ll also learn how Java is able ...

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