Dear Friends,
The command line box I find frightening. I've only started using it since I began studying Java using Mr Hortons book, 'Beginning Java 2 SDK 1.4'. Before this I only had a smattering of knowledge about it and I call it a DOS box. The one time it did come in useful was when I wanted to re-install Windows 98 on an old machine and I used a floppy disk to run a command line program from which I could mount the CD drive which contained the Windows operating system. I would never have been successful though if I hadn't first downloaded explicit instructions from a frindly website.
But, I have to say, using the CMD box for doing Mr Hortons programs is a lot faster than the Coffee Beans IDE and in fact sometimes the programs (which always compile using the CMD box)wont compile in Coffee beans IDE.
I don't need many commands to use the CMD box for Java (at the moment) but I'm sometimes intriqued and sidetracked about other programs that I've discovered. One in particular is debug, whoa!, now theres a program that I would like to know something about. It just fascinates me that I'm looking at what is actually contained in the registers of the CPU. I know that there are ways of writing to the registers and even running Assembly language programs using debug and maybe one day I'll dabble a bit more in it but for now it's non-stop Java. Anyway, like one of the previous posts said, I don't think they'll ever get rid of the CMD box. It reminds me of some old people, you know the type, they do things in an old-fashioned way and they teach you skills which you didn't even know existed but they usually get a job done efficiently and sometimes even more quicky.
                       Stafford


It's a happy day when men beat their swords into ploughshares but, at the end of the day, only truth will set men free.