I think I'm starting to realize one of the main points of this class. From what I've seen so far, Computer Science (at this level) is learning those little tiny bits of information about how a language- Java- works. I don't think we really need to know the sizes of chars, ints, floats, or doubles for anything other than efficiency, but usually a program, which in this age probably has a gui more often than not, would not use anything like the printf command. Really, this class is geared towards the final exam, which, if covering things this specific, is probably a little too much in one direction or another.
Needless to say, learning this has been a good reminder since last year, but... I guess it's a good thing that I have exceedingly large amounts of extra time to do other things.