For loops

In this section, we're going to take a quick look at for loops. We use for loops to solve a common problem in Java in a very semantically elegant manner. These loops are appropriate when we need to iterate a variable to count how many times we've looped.

To start off, I've written a very basic program using a while loop; it prints the values 1 through 100 to the window on our screen. Once you've hashed out in your mind how this while loop is working, we'll write the same loop with a for loop so that we could see how the for loop is more elegant in this particular instance. Let's comment out our while loop so that we can still see it as shown in the following screenshot without having it execute any of its code and begin writing our for loop instead :

The basic syntax of a for loop looks very similar to that of a while loop. We have the reserved keyword, two parentheses in which we'll put some information that the loop needs, and the code block that we're going to loop through. Unlike...