Beginning Programming with Java For Dummies, 6th Edition

Introduction

What’s your story?

• Are you a working stiff, interested in knowing more about the way your company’s computers work?
• Are you a student who needs to complete some extra reading in order to survive a beginning computer course?
• Are you a typical computer user — you’ve done lots of word processing and you want to do something more interesting with your computer?
• Are you a job seeker with an interest in entering the fast-paced, glamorous, high-profile world of computer programming (or, at least, the decent-paying world of computer programming)?

Well, if you want to write computer programs, this book is for you. This book avoids the snobby of-course-you-already-know assumptions and describes computer programming from scratch.

About This Book

The book uses Java — a powerful, general-purpose computer programming language. But Java’s subtleties and eccentricities aren’t the book’s main focus. Instead, this book emphasizes a process — the process of creating instructions for a computer to follow. Many highfalutin books describe the mechanics of this process — the rules, the conventions, and the formalisms. But those other books aren’t written for real people. Those books don’t take you from where you are to where you want to be.

In this book, I assume very little about your experience with computers. As you read each section, you get to see inside my mind. You see the problems that I face, the things that I think, and the solutions that I find. Some problems are the kind ...