Defining Methods

Estimated time to read: 1 minute

If we were to define a checkBalance() method for the Savings Account example we talked about earlier, it would look like the following:

public void checkBalance(){
 System.out.println("Hello");
 System.out.println("Your balance is " + balance);
}

The first line, public void checkBalance(), is the method declaration. It gives the program some information about the method:

• public means that other classes can access this method.

• The void keyword means that there is no specific output from the method. We will see methods that are not void later in this lesson, but for now, all of our methods will be void.

• checkBalance() is the name of the method.

Every method has its own unique method signature which is comprised of the method’s name and its parameter type. In this example, the method signature is checkBalance().

The two print statements are inside the body of the method, which is defined by the curly braces: { and }.

Anything we can do in our main() method, we can do in other methods! All of the Java tools you know, like the math and comparison operators, can be used to make interesting and useful methods.

checkBalance() is considered a non-static method because its signature does not include the keyword static like the main() method does. We’ll learn more about non-static methods later in this course.