April 2001
Beginner
432 pages
10h 27m
English
Content preview from Absolute Beginner's Guide to Programming, Second EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Programs As Directions
Your computer is a blind and dumb machine waiting for you to give it instructions. When you do, it follows the instructions without second-guessing them. If you tell it to do something incorrectly, it does its best to do so. To repeat, a program is a list of detailed instructions that the computer carries out.
Detail is vital to making a machine follow out your orders. Programming is not difficult; what is difficult is breaking the computer's job into simple and detailed steps that assume nothing.
To get an idea of the thinking involved in programming, think about how you would describe starting a car to someone from the past. Suppose a cowboy named Heath from the Old West appears at your doorstep, bewildered by the sights ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.