Summary

Whew!

In this chapter, you've learned an enormous amount about the program development cycle and how to set up your C development environment. Getting Hello, world! to compile and run is a far larger accomplishment for beginners than they might imagine. You have a working text editor, a working compiler, and you've begun manipulating programs in a command-line interpreter. You have probably experienced frustration to an extent you've rarely experienced before. I, like many programmers before you, feel your pain. We have all lived that pain. And with luck, I'm here to help take some of that pain away. In the rest of this book, we'll explore various ways to optimize this whole experience.

You have begun to learn that programming is about solving problems. While we haven't solved many interesting programming problems yet, you are just beginning your journey from simple programs and problems to far more complex programs and problems. We'll encounter a few of these in later chapters.

Furthermore, you are now aware of ways to make your programs clearer to both yourself – especially months after you've written the code – and to others who might later be tasked with modifying your code for new demands.

To be sure, getting a C++, C#, Objective-C, or JavaScript environment up and running would be similar yet subtly different.

In the next chapter, we will go into much more detail about how Hello, world! works and then modify it in some interesting ways to learn about statements, blocks, and functions – the building blocks of larger and more interesting programs.

Woo-hoo! You did it! Isn't programming fun?