What this book covers?

Chapter 1, Introduction to Computer Programs, will give you an understanding of how computer programs work and how they interact with the computer hardware.

Chapter 2, Introduction to Programming Languages, will teach you the evolution of programming languages, how they are related, introduce different types of languages, and give you a basic understanding of some fundamental programming concepts.

Chapter 3, Types of Applications, explores how software comes in many forms and is created to solve a wide variety of problems. This chapter will introduce you to some of the essential application types and give you an understanding of how they work.

Chapter 4, Software Projects and How We Organize Our Code, covers how, when writing programs that are beyond the most trivial level, we will need to organize our code into several code files. In this chapter, we look at how this can be done efficiently. We will also see how we can incorporate code written by others into our software projects.

Chapter 5, Sequence – The Basic Building Block of a Computer Program, outlines how a computer program is, at the most fundamental level, built by putting statements in the correct sequence. We will see how this is done and how the computer will execute these statement sequences when our programs run.

Chapter 6, Working with Data – Variables, explores how all computer programs will perform operations on data and modify it in some way. In this chapter, we will get to know the types of data we will work with when programming and what types of operations we can perform on them.

Chapter 7, Program Control Structures, discusses how, when writing programs, we need to control the path that the execution takes through our code. To help us, we have different types of control structures that we can use to accomplish this.

Chapter 8, Understanding Functions, explores functions as a fundamental concept in programming that let us package code into a reusable unit. In this chapter, we will see what functions are and how they can be used.

Chapter 9, When Things Go Wrong – Bugs and Exceptions, reminds us that things will not always go according to plan. The code we have written might contain errors, or we might get data that we can't work with. In this chapter, we will see how we can deal with both situations.

Chapter 10, Programming Paradigms, explores several ideas for how we should write and structure our code to be able to write programs as efficiently as possible. These are called paradigms, and we will look at the most prominent ones in this chapter.

Chapter 11, Programming Tools and Methodologies, examines how programmers use different tools when developing software. We will look at some of them in this chapter, and also consider how teams of programmers can collaborate efficiently.

Chapter 12, Code Quality, explores the many aspects of code quality. How can we write programs that run fast, or efficiently use the computer's resources? How can we write code that can easily be read and understood by other programmers that will need to modify our code? These are some of the things we will cover in this chapter.

Appendix A – How to Translate the Pseudocode into Real Code, covers how to translate pseudo code into different programming languages.

Appendix B - Dictionary has all the words which are unique or have a technical meaning and are used in the book.