Principles of Programming & Coding

Book Description A program is a set of instructions, meant to be carried out by one of more individuals or intelligent machines. An Army drill sergeant uses a simple set of instructions to control his men. Once the meaning of the basic commands is understood, the sergeant could confine his men to a given area or control their behavior during a 20-mile hike. The set of commands he uses is similar to the commands in a computer program; it can be pre-recorded, so that no human programmer (or drill sergeant) is needed.

For the most part we are concerned with instructions that a computer programs gives to a digital computer. The program may by very simple, for instance, to input a number of statements and the then output them in alphabetical order, or it may be far more complex, involving branch points and convergence criteria to decide when it is done. Computer programs must be written in a computer language understandable to both the human programmer and the computer. The development of computer languages is itself a major subfield of linguistics—the study of languages and their grammars.
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