I am looking forward to spending 24 hours with this book getting back in the Java fold. I was trained in Java back in 1999 when version 2 was just coming out, but I never became a full time practitioner. My only experiences since then has been with snippets of Javascript here and there. Alot has changed in 10+ years!

My first obstacle in Lesson 1...after running javac command and creating the class file, I attempt to run java command to actually run the program but I get an error:

"Error: Could not find or laod main class HelloWorld"

Googling this I find that I possibly need to set a CLASSPATH variable as well as a PATH variable. Yakov does not make mention of this on page 6 where he spells out how to set the PATH variable.

If I run "java -cp . HelloWorld" the program will run fine but it seems that I need to take the proper step to set the variable. Can someone expand on this?

Hi dthoma128

are you running java HelloWorld in the folder where the HelloWorld.java and HelloWorld.class have been saved. I created a folder of c:\practicaljava\lesson1
cd to that directory and ran java HelloWorld.

I think the "Error: Could not find or load main class HelloWorld" is been return because java can not find Helloworld in the current directory, the option -cp will search the path of directories zip and jar files. This is finding Helloworld somewhere in your directory path.

Hope this helps.

Yes I had them both in a folder on my desktop. Does this mean I have to make an entry for this folder in my CLASSPATH environmental variable similar to the PATH variable entry explained on page 6?

I never added the location of the folder where HelloWorld.java and HelloWorld.class are save to my CLASSPATH my CLASSPATH variable value in Environment Varibles is as follows.

.;C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\lib\ext\QTJava.zip

and the Path for Java.

;C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_23\bin

my OS is vista