Understanding Java Operators

A Java operator is a special symbol that can be applied to a set of variables, values, or literals—referred to as operands—and that returns a result. Three flavors of operators are available in Java: unary, binary, and ternary. These types of operators can be applied to one, two, or three operands, respectively. For the OCA exam, you'll need know a specific subset of Java operators, how to apply them, and the order in which they should be applied.

Java operators are not necessarily evaluated from left-to-right order. For example, the following Java expression is actually evaluated from right-to-left given the specific operators involved:

int y = 4;
double x = 3 + 2 * --y;

In this example, you would first decrement y to 3, and then multiply the resulting value by 2, and finally add 3. The value would then be automatically upcast from 9 to 9.0 and assigned to x. The final values of x and y would be 9.0 and 3, respectively. If you didn&apos...