Learning to Program

by Steven Foote

Everyone can benefit from basic programming skills-and after you start, you just might want to go a whole lot further. Author Steven Foote taught himself to program, figuring out the best ways to overcome every obstacle. Now a professional web developer, he'll help you follow in his footsteps. He teaches concepts you can use with any modern programming language, whether you want to program computers, smartphones, tablets, or even robots. Learning to Program will help you build a solid foundation in programming that can prepare you to achieve just about any programming goal. Whether you want to become a professional software programmer, or you want to learn how to more effectively communicate with programmers, or you are just curious about how programming works, this book is a great first step in helping to get you there. Learning to Program "will help you get started even if you aren't sure where to begin." " " - Learn how to simplify and automate many programming tasks - Handle different types of data in your programs - Use regular expressions to find and work with patterns - Write programs that can decide what to do, and when to do it - Use functions to write clean, well-organized code - Create programs others can easily understand and improve - Test and debug software to make it reliable - Work as part of a programming team - Learn the next steps to take to build a lifetime of programming skills

Genres: Programming, Computers

336 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 16, 2014

Reviews

[Laurence Scotford · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not really in the market for beginner programming books these days, although I've read a fair few in my time. But I just so happened to be looking for information on Grunt (the JavaScript build tool) on Safari Books the other day, and this popped up in the results. That's strange, I thought, why would a beginners programming book have so many references to Grunt? So I let my curiosity get the better of me and took a look.

I was pleasantly surprised. Most beginner programming books start you off with yet another uninspiring version of "Hello World" and then proceed to drag you kicking and screaming through mind-numbingly tedious exercise after exercise as key concepts are introduced. But Steven Foote has clearly taken a long hard look at this market and thought "stuff that for a lark". Not only is his book structured around the creation of a fun project (writing a Google Chrome extension to turn Facebook images into pictures of kittens), but right from the start he shows the reader how to set up a professional quality coding environment, including build, test and documentation tools. He even touches on version control towards the end.

I really wish I'd learned from a book that was this practical and this oriented towards current best practice.
If you are in the market for a beginner programming book, read this one - it will be time well spent.

[Kirsten · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clear, easy-to-understand introduction to programming concepts! While it uses JavaScript to teach, the big highlight here was explanations of the underlying concepts of programming that you could apply to a variety of different languages. It's written in layman's terms that make it easy to grasp without getting lost in jargon (at least until you're ready for it!). If you're looking for coding tutorials, those can easily be found online, but this is a great resource for learning programming as a whole. I had picked this up from the library, but it is on my list to buy for future reference!

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read an early version of this book (the author is my brother), and it was great. An accessible, enjoyable introduction to principles of programming. Highly recommended!