In this section, you'll learn about the C programming language, the language supported by the Arduino IDE. In this section, we are going to cover some basic concepts. If you are new to programming, there are a number of different websites that provide tutorials. If you'd like to practice some of the basic programming concepts in C, try www.cprogramming.com/tutorial.html or http://www.learn-c.org/.

In this section, we'll cover how to create a basic sketch. We'll also cover how to enter some C code, compile the code, and upload the code to your Arduino.

To open a new sketch from the IDE that contains the minimum basic code, navigate to File | Examples | 01.Basics | BareMinimum. You should now see this in your sketch as shown in the following screenshot:

This basic sketch provides two functions; a function is simply an organized set of instructions that Arduino will execute. When Arduino is powered on, it begins to execute a list of instructions one by one. These...