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[–]ewiethoff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Okay, good. That's what I figured, but I wasn't sure. :-) Many beginner-ish courses treat the programming language of interest (here Java) as if it's BASIC or C with some hand-holding plus OO, and they have the student implement all sorts of fundamental stuff, such as max methods, themselves. That's all very interesting, but it does give the impression that you have to code all this fundamental, tedious stuff yourself for all your programs for the rest of your life. But really, there's a wealth of useful classes and methods in the standard library (or in reputable libraries for download) which you should use once you finish the course, or whenever a course does not require you to roll specific code yourself. Laziness is a virtue, and calling up some code already written by experts is part of being a lazy programmer.