Learn the core ideas and skills needed to begin programming in any language on any platform. Author Chris Kennedy uses JavaScript to explore the syntax and semantics of a programming language, and shows you how to write and execute your first program and understand what's going on under the hood. Along the way, you'll explore other programming languages, including C, Java, and Python, and learn the reasons to choose one language over another. Each lesson builds on the preceding one, so even if you've never written a line of code, you'll gain enough hands-on experience to be comfortable approaching any language. You can download the source code to follow along with all the examples.

• Write source code on Windows, Mac, Linux, or Unix systems.
• Make sense of programming jargon and buzzwords.
• Understand compiled and interpreted languages.
• Compare how code is written in different languages.
• Work with numbers, strings, booleans, and other types of data.
• Get input from the user.
• Explore conditions, loops, variables, and expressions.
• Control the structure and the flow of a program.
• Use assignment, arithmetic, comparison, and logical operators.
• Create and call functions.
• Organize your code into independent modules.
• Work with arrays and collections.
• Adopt a programming style.
• Read from and write to files.
• Avoid common syntax and logic errors.
• Debug your programs.
• Use classes, objects, properties, and methods.
• Link to libraries of ready-to-run code.
• Explore memory management, algorithms, multithreading, and other advanced topics.

Contents
1. Programming Basics
2. Writing Your First Program
3. Variables & Data Types
4. Conditional Code
5. Functions
6. More About Strings
7. Arrays
8. Programming Style & Pseudocode
9. Input & Output
10. Errors & Debugging
11. Objects
12. Advanced Topics
13. Next Steps

About the Author
Chris Kennedy is a statistical programmer and technical writer based in Boulder, Colorado. When he's not typing, Chris climbs rocks, revises his screenplays, and reads the journals of polar explorers. He's been programming and writing about programming for more than twenty years.