Book Image

Computer Programming for Absolute Beginners

By : Joakim Wassberg
4 (1)
Book Image

Computer Programming for Absolute Beginners

4 (1)
By: Joakim Wassberg

Overview of this book

Learning how to code has many advantages, and gaining the right programming skills can have a massive impact on what you can do with your current skill set and the way you advance in your career. This book will be your guide to learning computer programming easily, helping you overcome the difficulties in understanding the major constructs in any mainstream programming language. Computer Programming for Absolute Beginners starts by taking you through the building blocks of any programming language with thorough explanations and relevant examples in pseudocode. You'll understand the relationship between computer programs and programming languages and how code is executed on the computer. The book then focuses on the different types of applications that you can create with your programming knowledge. You'll delve into programming constructs, learning all about statements, operators, variables, and data types. As you advance, you'll see how to control the flow of your programs using control structures and reuse your code using functions. Finally, you'll explore best practices that will help you write code like a pro. By the end of this book, you'll be prepared to learn any programming language and take control of your career by adding coding to your skill set.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Computer Programs and Computer Programming
6
Section 2: Constructs of a Programming Language
7
Chapter 5: Sequence – The Basic Building Block of a Computer Program
14
Section 3: Best Practices for Writing High-Quality Code
Appendix B: Dictionary
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W

Understanding functional programming

Functional programming is a paradigm that has gained popularity. It is not new; we can trace its roots back to Lambda calculus, which was introduced in the 1930s. In the 1950s, the programming language Lisp was developed and implemented this paradigm.

As we will see, this paradigm has a very different approach to how programs are structured and implemented. You will need to rethink the way you look at programming and code structure to be able to understand the strength of this paradigm.

We will begin by looking at a definition of functional programming. The definition will, itself, be hard to understand, so we will also need to look at some parts of it to understand what this is all about.

One definition is as follows:

"Functional programming is a way of structuring a computer program that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids changing the state of the program and the use of mutable data.&quot...