The Java Tutorials have been written for JDK 8. Examples and practices described in this page don't take advantage of improvements introduced in later releases and might use technology no longer available.
See Java Language Changes for a summary of updated language features in Java SE 9 and subsequent releases.
See JDK Release Notes for information about new features, enhancements, and removed or deprecated options for all JDK releases.
The if-then
statement is the most basic of all the control flow statements. It tells your program to execute a certain section of code only if a particular test evaluates to true
. The if-then-else
statement provides a secondary path of execution when an "if" clause evaluates to false
. Unlike if-then
and if-then-else
, the switch
statement allows for any number of possible execution paths. The while
and do-while
statements continually execute a block of statements while a particular condition is true
. The difference between do-while
and while
is that do-while
evaluates its expression at the bottom of the loop instead of the top. Therefore, the statements within the do
block are always executed at least once. The for
statement provides a compact way to iterate over a range of values. It has two forms, one of which was designed for looping through collections and arrays.