Programming FAQ Learn C and C Programming Cprogramming.com covers both C and C in-depth, with both beginner-friendly tutorials, more advanced articles, and the book Jumping into C, which is. What is Programming Language? As mentioned above, Computers understand instructions that are written in a specific syntactical form called a programming language. A programming language. Programming is a critical skill in today’s economy, and there is a shortage of qualified developers. Whether you’re new to coding, adding more skills, or advancing your career, 10 hours a week will prepare you for your ideal developer job.
Computer programming is the act of writing computer programs, which are a sequence of instructions written using a Computer Programming Language to perform a specified task by the computer.
Computer Programming is fun and easy to learn provided you adopt a proper approach. This tutorial attempts to cover the basics of computer programming using a simple and practical approach for the benefit of novice learners.
This tutorial has been prepared for the beginners who are willing to learn computer programming but they are unable to learn it due to lack of proper guidance. We are confident that after completing this tutorial, you will be at a level where you can code in C Programming language and will have a basic understanding of Java and Python programming languages as well from where you can continue further.
If you are completely new to Computer Programming, then we recommend you to read this tutorial twice or even thrice. First reading will not give you much idea, but during your second reading, you will start grasping most of the concepts and you will enjoy writing computer programs.
We do not expect much from you as prerequisites, however, we assume that you have some amount of exposure to computers and its peripherals like keyboard, mouse, screen, printer, etc.
We all have heard about Computer Programming gaining a lot of popularity in the past 3 decades. So many students these days want to opt for a Computer Science stream in order to get a job at their dream tech company - Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and whatnot.
In this blog post, we will decipher the term “programming” and understand its usage and many other related terms.
Programming is a way to “instruct the computer to perform various tasks”.
Confusing? Let us understand the definition deeply.
“Instruct the computer”: this basically means that you provide the computer a set of instructions that are written in a language that the computer can understand. The instructions could be of various types. For example:
Just like we humans can understand a few languages (English, Spanish, Mandarin, French, etc.), so is the case with computers. Computers understand instructions that are written in a specific syntactical form called a programming language.
“Perform various tasks”: the tasks could be simple ones like we discussed above (adding 2 numbers, rounding off a number) or complex ones which may involve a sequence of multiple instructions. For example:
The above 2 tasks require complex calculations. They cannot usually be expressed in simple instructions like adding 2 numbers, etc.
Hence, in summary, Programming is a way to tell computers to do a specific task.
You must be wondering - why does one need a computer for adding or rounding off numbers? Or even for simple interest calculation? After all, even an 8th standard kid can easily do such things even over large numbers. What is programming used for? What benefits do computers offer?
Well, computers offer so many benefits:
As mentioned above, Computers understand instructions that are written in a specific syntactical form called a programming language. A programming language provides a way for a programmer to express a task so that it could be understood and executed by a computer. Refer our another blog-post 'What is programming language?' to know more about programming languages. Some of the popularProgramming languages are Python, C, C++, Java, etc.
Now, after knowing so many things about programming, the big question to be answered is - why should you learn Computer Programming? Let us understand why:
Let us now get into an actual program
Python is a widely-used programming language. It is extremely beginner-friendly. You can download Python here: https://www.python.org/downloads/. After downloading, run the installer in order to install Python on your machine.
Let us delve into our first Python code now. Open your favorite text editor (we’d recommend Sublime Text) and copy-paste the following 3 lines:
Save the file on your desktop as my_first_program.py
Now, do one of the following depending on your operating system:
When you press enter, what do you see on the screen? Almost instantly after you press the enter key, you will see the following:
What’s that? That’s 548, computed by your computer in the blink of an eye! A typical human will take minutes if not seconds to get the result. You see the power of a Computer?
Congratulations, you’ve written your first program. Let us understand how it works.
We are declaring here that we have a “placeholder” called as a to which we assign the value 54.
Here, we are declaring another placeholder called as b to which we assign the value a ** 8. Here, the value of a is 54. So, effectively we are computing 54 ** 8. What is **? The ** operator is the “power” operator. a ** b means ab.
Finally, after the computation is done, we want to display the result on the screen. For this, we have used the print statement which essentially throws the result on your screen.
So, that was about the very basics of Computer programming. Hope you enjoyed reading it. Computer Programming is a huge field and there is a lot to explore further. Keep learning and keep exploring. Please feel free to post your doubts in the comments section. Please don’t worry if you feel that your doubt is maybe silly. Every question/doubt is important. There's no such thing as a stupid question.
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