Programming Overview

Programming

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Programming is the act of writing source code for a computer program in such a way that a modern computer can understand and perform the steps described in the code. There are many different programming languages that can be used, such as high-level languages like Java and Python.

To run code written in those languages, we can use a compiler to convert the code to a low-level language that can be directly executed by the computer, or we can use an interpreter to read the code and perform the requested operations on the computer.

At this point, we have most likely written some programs already. This chapter will review the important aspects of our chosen programming language, giving us a solid basis to build upon. Hopefully most of this will be review, but there may be a few new terms or concepts introduced here as well.