I have recently learnt how to program in java, I was looking at some open source programs from sourceforge.net and after downloading these programs I don't understand the file structure most of the programs follow. Pretty much every program has src,bin,lib etc folders, how do I know the standard way of organizing my program. Is there any book or resource which explains this? also how do I compile this source code once I have downloaded it, to make a jar file from it
thanks
What you have downloaded is actually a distribution version of the program. The directories as listed by carej are kind of a convention, mainly derived from how things are usually done on a Unix system.
Most projects supply some manual on how to build. This can be tricky if not all libraries (jars) used by the program are supplied in the distribution. Some of the Apache Commons project do it like this, thus forcing the user to download dependencies seperately.
If you just want to use the program try to find a binary version. This will usually consist of jars, scripts and documentation. Source distributions are useful if you want to look at the source and/or make modifications.