Get to grips with the building blocks of programming languages and get started on your programming journey without a computer science degree
▶Book Description
Learning how to code has many advantages, and gaining the right programming skills can have a massive impact on what you can do with your current skill set and the way you advance in your career. This book will be your guide to learning computer programming easily, helping you overcome the difficulties in understanding the major constructs in any mainstream programming language.
Computer Programming for Absolute Beginners starts by taking you through the building blocks of any programming language with thorough explanations and relevant examples in pseudocode. You'll understand the relationship between computer programs and programming languages and how code is executed on the computer. The book then focuses on the different types of applications that you can create with your programming knowledge. You'll delve into programming constructs, learning all about statements, operators, variables, and data types. As you advance, you'll see how to control the flow of your programs using control structures and reuse your code using functions. Finally, you'll explore best practices that will help you write code like a pro.
By the end of this book, you'll be prepared to learn any programming language and take control of your career by adding coding to your skill set.
▶What You Will Learn
-Get to grips with basic programming language concepts such as variables, loops, selection and functions
-Understand what a program is and how the computer executes it
-Explore different programming languages and learn about the relationship between source code and executable code
-Solve problems using various paradigms such as procedural programming, object oriented programming, and functional programming
-Write high-quality code using several coding conventions and best practices
-Become well-versed with how to track and fix bugs in your programs
▶Key Features
-Understand the fundamentals of a computer program and apply the concepts you learn to different programming languages
-Gain the confidence to write your first computer program
-Explore tips, techniques, and best practices to start coding like a professional programmer
▶Who This Book Is For
This book is for beginners who have never programmed before and are looking to enter the world of programming. This includes anyone who is about to start studying programming and wants a head start, or simply wants to learn how to program on their own.
▶What this book covers
- Chapter 1, Introduction to Computer Programs, will give you an understanding of how computer programs work and how they interact with the computer hardware.
- Chapter 2, Introduction to Programming Languages, will teach you the evolution of programming languages, how they are related, introduce different types of languages, and give you a basic understanding of some fundamental programming concepts.
- Chapter 3, Types of Applications, explores how software comes in many forms and is created to solve a wide variety of problems. This chapter will introduce you to some of the essential application types and give you an understanding of how they work.
- Chapter 4, Software Projects and How We Organize Our Code, covers how, when writing programs that are beyond the most trivial level, we will need to organize our code into several code files. In this chapter, we look at how this can be done efficiently. We will also see how we can incorporate code written by others into our software projects.
- Chapter 5, Sequence . The Basic Building Block of a Computer Program, outlines how a computer program is, at the most fundamental level, built by putting statements in the correct sequence. We will see how this is done and how the computer will execute these statement sequences when our programs run.
- Chapter 6, Working with Data – Variables, explores how all computer programs will perform operations on data and modify it in some way. In this chapter, we will get to know the types of data we will work with when programming and what types of operations we can perform on them.
- Chapter 7, Program Control Structures, discusses how, when writing programs, we need to control the path that the execution takes through our code. To help us, we have different types of control structures that we can use to accomplish this.
- Chapter 8, Understanding Functions, explores functions as a fundamental concept in programming that let us package code into a reusable unit. In this chapter, we will see what functions are and how they can be used.
- Chapter 9, When Things Go Wrong – Bugs and Exceptions, reminds us that things will not always go according to plan. The code we have written might contain errors, or we might get data that we can't work with. In this chapter, we will see how we can deal with both situations.
- Chapter 10, Programming Paradigms, explores several ideas for how we should write and structure our code to be able to write programs as efficiently as possible. These are called paradigms, and we will look at the most prominent ones in this chapter.
- Chapter 11, Programming Tools and Methodologies, examines how programmers use different tools when developing software. We will look at some of them in this chapter, and also consider how teams of programmers can collaborate efficiently.
- Chapter 12, Code Quality, explores the many aspects of code quality. How can we write programs that run fast, or efficiently use the computer's resources? How can we write code that can easily be read and understood by other programmers that will need to modify our code? These are some of the things we will cover in this chapter.
- Appendix A – How to Translate the Pseudocode into Real Code, covers how to translate pseudo code into different programming languages.
- Appendix B - Dictionary has all the words which are unique or have a technical meaning and are used in the book.
