Back to Basics: Primitive Data Types

Starting today there are going to be a range of back to basics articles looking at the basic building blocks of the Java language. First up are primitive data types. It would be hard to find a program that doesn't use at least one primitive data type. They give Java programs the ability to handle numbers, characters and determine the state of conditions.

As a bonus, to help explain the char data type, I'm also having a look at character encoding. More specifically, the Unicode standard. It currently defines a way for computers to represent over 100,000 characters!