11.1 What are Methods?

However, you can break up your programs into more methods than just the main method. You can customize what these methods do to help you accomplish the entire task at hand. For example, if I told you to print “Hello World” 5 times, you could use a for loop with System.out.println("Hello World") inside the body. Alternatively, I could write a method called printMessage() which does that exact same thing, but there’s less typing (see highlighted code).

public class Methods {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // prints "Hello World" 5 times
        for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
            printMessage();
        }
    }

    /** Prints "Hello World" */
    public static void printMessage() {
        System.out.println("Hello World");
    }
}