What Is Programming?

Learn to Program, Third Edition — by Chris Pine (6 / 116)

👈 Introduction | TOC | Programming Languages 👉

Programming is telling your computer how to do something. Large tasks must be broken down into smaller tasks, which must be broken down into still smaller tasks, continuing down to the simplest tasks that you don’t have to describe — the tasks your computer already knows how to do. (These are really basic things such as arithmetic or displaying some text on your screen.)

My biggest problem when I was learning to program was that I was trying to learn it backwards. I knew what I wanted the computer to do and tried working backward from that, breaking it down until I got to something the computer knew how to do. Bad idea. I didn’t know what the computer could do, so I didn’t know what to break the problem down to. (Mind you, now that I do know, this is exactly how I program. But it doesn’t work to start that way.)

That’s why you’re going to learn it differently. You’ll first learn about some of the things your computer can do and then break some simple tasks down into steps your computer can handle. Your first program will be so easy, it won’t even take you a minute.

One reason your first program will be so easy is that you’ll be writing it in one of the more elegant programming languages, Ruby. It’s a good choice for a first programming language.

👈 Introduction | TOC | Programming Languages 👉

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