Enthuware

I was wondering, with IDE's such as NetBeans, Eclipse, IntelliJ , etc. out in the market, why do Java books still put so much emphasis on command line compilation and creation of Jar files?

For two reasons -
1. Certification exam requires you to know about compilation and execution.
2. An IDE does a lot of things transparently besides compilation and execution (such as managing PATHs, managing dependencies, managing resource files and so on) and by not knowing what it is doing is and why is it doing that, sets you up for a failure later. Moreover, Production environments don't have IDEs. For deploying to production environments, you will need to know exactly what is packaged where. You may also need to tweak things without using IDEs. So, basics are always very important. They give you a good perspective

Wow, I had no idea Java IDE's still needed that much hand holding from the command line. Thanks for the insight.