JD1's Personal Development Blog

Originally Posted by KevinWorkman

Just a few words of advice, take them or leave them:

Even if an if or a loop only consists of a single statement, you should still surround it with {brackets}. This is not only a standard Java convention, but I promise it'll save you a headache in the future.

And perhaps I can clear up some of your thoughts on the switch statement.

You use an if statement to test conditions, the operands of which you might not know at compile time, because they can change depending on program flow. But a subsection of those cases exists where you do know the value of one of the operands at compile time, and you're simply testing whether the other operand is equal to any of those known values. That's when you use a switch statement. It's not just more efficient, but once you're used to it, the syntax is also easier to read (easier to read than a bunch of if statements), which makes it easier to debug and harder to screw up.