Brain-storming: Why You Should Learn to Program
Hello Dear Students and welcome to programming fundamentals which title as Introduction to programming in C. I'm excited that you have the chance to come learn to program with me. It will be a great way to learn. You don't need any prior background
in programming, just an eagerness to learn and excitement about thinking through problems.
Just mentioned, this is great if you're new to programming. You might be thinking about learning for a wide variety of reasons. Maybe you want to become a professional software developer, if so this is a great starting point. We're going to build solid
fundamentals that will serve you well in both C and any other language.Or maybe you want programming skills to use in some other discipline. I know a lot of social scientists and natural scientists who have found programming necessary, to analyze
the data that they have to explore the problems in their field. You may have already taken a computer fundamentals course and be looking to expand your skills. This can be a great chance to both build your programming skills from solid fundamentals
And to learn a new language.
So what's special about the way that I am going to teach you? I am going to start from the very beginning. A lot of programming courses assume you can just figure out how to write code from seeing a few examples. I am not going to do that. Instead,
I am going to teach you a step-by-step approach(actually seven steps) to solve programming problems. I will discuss later how this seven step approach is a great way to tackle any programming problem.
I am also going to teach you how to read code as well as how to write it. After all, how can you write if you can't read? For every piece of syntax that I teach you, I am also going to teach you the semantics, what exactly the code does. For any code
you write, you will be able to execute it by hand, saying exactly what every line does. I want you to learn that everything in programming is about well defined rules, which you can understand and follow, or even execute yourself.
So, where do we go from here? The rest of this course is all about computational thinking. You'll learn a lot of important concepts, how to design an algorithm to solve a problem, how to execute a piece of code by hand.
You will learn to use a variety of tools that are important to develop your code. You'll learn things like how to turn your code into an actual program that the computer can run, which is called compiling. You'll also learn about testing and debugging,
finding and fixing mistakes in your program.
In this course, you will learn about ways to store more complex data using pointers, arrays and strings. If you don't know what these are now no problem we'll explain them when we get there.
Also learn how to interact with the user and the system, as well as how to dynamically allocate memory when you don't know in advance how much data you have to work with. So, let's get started. Thank you.