About Programming ❓

Before we start programming, we should define why programming matters and what it is.

Why Program?

Programming gives you the power to create digital “things” on your computer – whether it’s a website, a video game, a social media platform, a stock trading bot, or an face identification application. Additionally, programming can help improve your critical thinking as it’s very much a puzzle, often with more than one path to a valid solution. I hope you’ll find the joy in programming after completing this guide!

What is Programming?

Programming is making instructions or programs that a computer can follow. Think of programs like a to-do list but for computers, where each instruction is another item on that list.

When a computer is following instructions of a program, we say that the computer is running the program.

A program’s instructions is called it’s source code or code for short. The file that contains these instructions is sometimes called the source file. In C, our source files end in ".c".

Often times, you can’t actually run code on it’s own because computers can only understand binary, which are lines of ones and zeros. Therfore we have to convert, or compile, our code into a program that can then run on our computers. The special programs that compile our code are called compilers.