Question

I am still a newbie java programmer. I was learning about Java IO and noticed that in the book as well as in the online tutorials they donot talk about scanner class. They always mention, creating input/output stream reader objects and use them to read or write.

I am very familiar with scanner class and after reading I started to think may be scanner is not the right way to read console input/files in java.

Please clarify my doubt and if you could point me to an easy to understand tutorial, it will be great. I have already looked up oracle docs and other popular websites. Read Herbert schildt’s book & the awful head first java book (barf..barf)

Answer 1

The scanner class is a special file reader which is optimized for reading text files. If you want to read other file types the scanner class is not optimal.
A good overview can be found here java i/o. The summary form there:

The java.io package contains many classes that your programs can use to read and write data. Most of the classes implement sequential access streams. The sequential access streams can be divided into two groups: those that read and write bytes and those that read and write Unicode characters. Each sequential access stream has a speciality, such as reading from or writing to a file, filtering data as its read or written, or serializing an object.

After reading this, you should look into Apache Commons I/O which give you some handy utility classes for i/o.