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Managing Your Programming Environment

For the most part how you organize and manage your programming environment is as personal as decorating your home. However, there are some things that you must do for your classes to work properly with the Java compiler and interpreter, and there are some things that you should do to make your life easier.

The CLASSPATH Environment Variable

You use the environment variable called CLASSPATH to indicate to the interpreter where your classes are located on your system.

Creating and Using Packages

As your code base of Java classes grows, you will need to organize your classes and your directory structure in a way to provide an efficient and convenient programming environment. One of the easiest ways to organize your work is to group related classes and interfaces together into Java packages.


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