Having a little trouble with this task. Started but not sure if I'm on the right track.

Hi Kevin,

You're on the right track conceptually but there are a couple of issues with your code syntactically.

I've removed the comments and restyled using the Allman-8 format (putting braces on a second line and using 8 space indents), hopefully this makes it easier to see some of the issues.

public class ConferenceRegistrationAssistant 
{
        public int getLineNumberFor(String lastName) 
        {
                int lineNumber = 0;

                if(lastName.charAt[0] => A && <= M)
                        return 1;
        }
        else(lastName.charAt[0] => N && <= Z)
                return 2;
}

Hopefully here you can see that your else clause is not within the getLineNumberFor method. I wouldn't expect this to compile and it's certainly not going to do what you want if it did.

So, first off, let's fix that up.

public class ConferenceRegistrationAssistant 
{
        public int getLineNumberFor(String lastName) 
        {
                int lineNumber = 0;

                if(lastName.charAt[0] => A && <= M)
                        return 1;
                else(lastName.charAt[0] => N && <= Z)
                        return 2;
        }
}

While this looks a lot nicer (and has our code in the right places) we still have some issues.

Character literals in Java are enclosed in single quotes, e.g. 'a', 'b', 'c'. So your use of A, M, N, and Z will be interpreted by the compiler as referring to other variables within the program (e.g. A = 42521) but these variables don't actually exist. So let's put quotes around these to make them character literals.

I can see what you're going for with charAt[0], but charAt is a method of the String object, and methods get called like functions (e.g. charAt(0)). This is actually a really easy mistake to make, and I will admit that not having used Java for six months I initially tried lastName[0] for this challenge. It's great to understand that a String is an array of characters! While some languages let you access this array directly with array index notation, Java requires you to use the charAt() method. This is because Strings in Java are somewhat more complex objects than the arrays of chars in other languages.

After your && operator you need to fully restate the condition. You can check anything after an AND or OR operator, it doesn't have to be related to the prior condition, so this means you need to be explicit. That is to say, we write if (a > b && b > c) not if (a > b && > c)

Also, else clauses don't take conditions, only if and else if do. So you'll need to either remove the condition or change to an else if clause. If you change to an else if you'll need to also add an else at the end to return something in the event that none of the conditions match. Or you could restructure your program a little, for instance: mutating the provided variable in your conditional branches and then returning that.

Okay, so now we have:

public class ConferenceRegistrationAssistant 
{
        public int getLineNumberFor(String lastName) 
        {
                int lineNumber = 0;

                if(lastName.charAt(0) => 'A' && lastName.charAt(0) <= 'M')
                        return 1;
                else if(lastName.charAt(0) => 'N' && lastName.charAt(0) <= 'Z')
                        return 2;
                else
                        return 0;
        }
}

if and else aren't functions, so we can go ahead and put a space between them and their conditions, this makes things a little nicer to read and is what other programmers will expect. Any code you write outside of learning exercises if likely to be read more often than written, even if by yourself, so keeping things neat and to convention can really save time in the long run. It'll become second nature very quickly too.

public class ConferenceRegistrationAssistant 
{
        public int getLineNumberFor(String lastName) 
        {
                int lineNumber = 0;

                if (lastName.charAt(0) => 'A' && lastName.charAt(0) <= 'M')
                        return 1;
                else if (lastName.charAt(0) => 'N' && lastName.charAt(0) <= 'Z')
                        return 2;
                else
                        return 0;
        }
}

Okay! That passes.

If you're curious, here's how I did it:

public class ConferenceRegistrationAssistant 
{
        public int getLineNumberFor(String lastName) 
        {
                int lineNumber = 0;

                if (lastName.charAt(0) < 'N')
                        lineNumber = 1;
                else
                        lineNumber = 2;

                return lineNumber;
        }
}