Learn to Program, 3rd Edition

Introduction

I vividly remember writing my first program. (My memory is pretty horrible; I don’t vividly remember many things, only things like waking up after oral surgery, watching the birth of my children, or writing my first program…you know, things like that.)

I suppose, looking back, that it was a fairly ambitious program for a newbie, maybe twenty or thirty lines of code. But I was a math major, after all, and we’re supposed to be good at things like “logical thinking.” So, I went down to the Reed College computer lab, armed only with a book on programming and my ego, sat down at one of the Unix terminals there, and started programming. Well, maybe “started” isn’t the right word. Or “programming.” I mostly just sat there, feeling hopelessly ...