Preface
The preface is that part at the beginning of a book that you skip over to get to the good stuff, right? Sure, you can skip over it if you want (hey, you’re the one turning the pages), but who knows what you might miss. . . . It’s not very long, so maybe you should give it a look, just in case.
Very simply, programming means telling a computer to do something. Computers are dumb machines. They don’t know how to do anything. You have to tell them everything, and you have to get all the details right.
Word Box
An instruction is a basic command you give to a computer, usually to do a single, very specific thing.
A computer program is made up of a number of instructions. Computers do all the great things they do today because a lot of smart programmers wrote programs or software to tell them how. Software just means a program or collection of programs that run on your computer, or sometimes on another computer yours is connected to, like a web server.
All computers use binary inside. But most people don’t speak binary very well. We need an easier way to tell the computer what we want it to do. So people invented programming languages. A computer programming language lets us write things in a way we can understand, and then translates that into binary for the computer to use.
