Learning to program gives us the ability to bring ideas to life. It is one of the most valuable skills to pick up in these modern times. Be it for a career boost up and landing a job in one of the giant companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple or just to write some cool program that can control a NASA satellite, Programming is an awesome tool for everyone’s toolbox.
If you are someone who wants to learn writing a computer program or to grasp the core ideas behind various terminologies and concepts, Then this article is a cheat-sheet summed up just for you.
Here are a few frequently asked questions explained in layman`s terms. You can skip them over as we will be exploring more about them later.
By writing a set of instructions in a language that a computer understands, we can command it to do almost anything. In a layman’s term, that process is called programming. Also sometimes known as coding or software development.
A computer program can be something as simple as a calculator or something more complex like a website or a game. The browser you are using to view this article is itself a program.
The set of instructions or code supplied to a computer are generally written in a syntactical form called a programming language. Some of the most famous of them all are C, C++, Java, Python, C# etc. Similar to the languages that we speak, A programming language is a mediator that helps a programmer to express a task to the Computer such that it can execute it.
Over the past years, the way we think about programming has undergone many changes. Many new tools, platforms, concepts and numerous programming languages have been introduced. That being the reason for all the confusion that beginners usually face. Programming itself is not so difficult as they say. Its just that the path has become broader and there are a lot of topics you need to be familiar with.
Programming is a challenging, high-paying career. It often comes with
- location flexibility ( work from home, your friends house, or from a coffee shop),
- flexible hours ( 2-3 Hours a day, 20-30 hours a week).
If you have got the right skills, jobs will come knocking at your doorsteps.
According to the US Department of Labor, 8 of the 10 fastest growing occupations are computer related.
Programming is a Hard Skill. Hard skills unlike soft skills like sales, marketing, people skills etc are easier to communicate on a resume, and to test and qualify, the job hunting process is often much faster for programmers than for a product manager. If you ever post your resume on any major job boards with Senior .NET Developer, Senior Java Developer in the title (with experience to back it up), you would receive your first phone call in a few hours.
In the following chapters, certain words like programming, coding, software development are used synonymously though they are not quite the same.
Specific terms (buzz words) will be marked as bold for your convenience.
No prior knowledge, tools, text editors or any specific operating system is required to go through the following chapters and the things we will be exploring.
Well !!! Welcome to the world of programming ….