Preface

Welcome to the beautiful world of programming. Programming is an art form in which you will use your imagination and creativity to create things. If you know how to program, your possibilities will be endless.

You can use it to create a fun game. Or maybe you want to automate things in your life. Maybe you want to become a professional programmer, and then you will use your skills to work in teams with others to create solutions that will be used by many people for a long time.

Having programming skills is also something that is needed in more and more professions. Your job title will not be that of a software developer. Instead, programming will be a tool that you can use.

I have been teaching programming for over 30 years. I have been teaching people of all ages, from beginners to senior professional developers. During this time, I have seen patterns, especially among beginners.

It took some time before I realized what made so many of my beginner students struggle with grasping programming. The problem was that they had to learn two things at once. First, they needed to understand the very concepts of programming. There are so many concepts and words, both new ones and some that they already know, but that have a slightly different meaning. Secondly, they will also need to learn a programming language. Taking in all this at the same time will become overwhelming for many people. For some, it will be so much that they give up programming for good.

The idea of this book is to focus on one of the two things you need to learn. This book will not focus on any language, but instead, teach you the concepts you need to know and understand to become a programmer. After you have read this book, you can learn any programming language you want, and when you do, you can focus on just learning the language, as the rest you will already know.

With this book, I also want to put things into context, so there will be a bit of history, and some parts will be rather technical. I believe that if you are going to learn something, you cannot just scratch the surface. You need to dive into it and see how things work.

And yes, I was that kid who disassembled my RC car to see how it worked.

Good luck with your endeavors to learn this fantastic art.

This book was written to the music of Talking Heads, and I suggest you listen to it as you read it.