What is the difference between & and && in Java?

Question

I always thought that && operator in Java is used for verifying whether both its boolean operands are true, and the & oper

Answer 1

&& and || are called short circuit operators. When they are used, for || - if the first operand evaluates to true, then the rest of the operands are not evaluated. For && - if the first operand evaluates to false, the rest of them don't get evaluated at all.

so if (a || (++x > 0)) in this example the variable x won't get incremented if a was true.