Programming languages are used to facilitate communication about the task of organizing and manipulating information, and to express algorithms precisely. Some authors restrict the term "programming language" to those languages that can express all possible algorithms.
Sometimes the term "computer language" is used for more limited artificial languages.

In this course you will be writing programs using the Java programming language.
To complete the programming exercises in the course you will need to install the Java 2 Software Development Kit, available at no cost from Sun Microsystems.
The course will guide you through the installation of this software.