Before commencing to study the Java programming of interactivity, data structures, algorithms, and related matters, an acquaintence with the development environment used for this course is in order. The following sequence of instructions is taken from the first programming assignment -- writing the traditional first program in NetBeans! With just this very modest introduction to Netbeans, students quickly learned to become operationally independent in the NetBeans environment. Further, feedback from student course evaluations suggest that the students, without exception, very much liked working in the environment!

1. Get to Netbeans. (Try something like Launch | Applications | Programming | NetBeans.)
2. Choose File | New Project
3. Establish a new project by steping through the New Project wizzard.
1. On the Choose Project form:
1. simply click Next (since Catagories = General and Projects = Java Application) as is desired.
2. On the Name and Location form:
1. type HelloWorld into the Project Name field
2. "type" .../YUC/cs2/misc/helloworld (where YUC must be replaced by your user code) into the Location field.
3. click Finish.

4. Modify the source program template. Simply:
1. Replace the comment in the main method with the one line of code to say "Hello World!".
5. Press Ctrl-S to save the application.
6. Press F11 (or choose Build | Build Main Project) to "build" your project. (This act will cause an Ant script that the IDE prepares automatically to be run. Among other things, this script compiles the application. The Output window will display output from the Ant script.)
7. Press F6 (or choose Run| Run Main Project) to run the application. (You should see "Hello World!" appear among the information in the Output window.)