Hi David,
Welcome to JavaRanch!
Generally, when you're reading from System.in, you want to read one line of input at a time, as a
String. Then you do what needs to be done to interpret that String.
To read a line of input, you can use the readLine() method in the java.io.BufferedReader class:
Once you've got a String, you can use the static method Integer.parseInt() to turn it into an integer.
You probably should go read
Sun's I/O tutorial (and whatever other sections of the tutorial strike your fancy.)