How does returning an || statement work in java?

Question

I\'m new to programming so I have been working through the exercises at CodingBat.com. In the Recursion-2 section, there is a problem I wasn\'t able to solve (recursively) so I

Answer 1

return a || b;

does not mean:

return a || return b;

It actually means:

return (a || b);

It will evaluate a || b, and then return the result of that:

So if a or b is true (either one, or both, are true), it will return true. It will only be false if a and b are both false.

The point is: it evaluates the boolean expression first, then returns the value.

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Edit: You can look at this test code for examples on how it works.