Preface to the Third Edition

Learn to Program, Third Edition — by Chris Pine (3 / 116)

👈 Acknowledgments | TOC | What’s New in This Edition 👉

I just realized that I’ve been working on this book, in one form or another, for 18 years. When I started, it was before smartphones, before Twitter and YouTube, and before Gmail and Google Maps. You couldn’t visit MySpace in Firefox, because neither one existed yet. RSS feeds were the hot new thing.

The world has changed so much since then, and the changes keep happening faster and faster. This third edition was written under the shadow of COVID-19. As unemployment in the United States reaches heights not seen since the Great Depression, I still see lots of open programmer jobs out there. And programming is a job you can easily do from home.

Programming was a fun and interesting thing to learn in 2002. At the time not nearly as many programming jobs existed, but there were enough. And anyway, many of us did it for fun, for the joy of creating new things.

Today, surrounded by computers, programming increasingly feels like a critical skill to learn. It’s still as fun and rewarding as it ever was. But as more industries become digital, and more companies become software companies with “an app for that,” the importance of programming is greater than it has ever been.

I’m excited to embark on this journey with you.

👈 Acknowledgments | TOC | What’s New in This Edition 👉

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