Chapter
1
What’s Programming?
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(Photo credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio)
Take a look at the pictures above. The first one shows forest cover in the Amazon basin in 1975. The second one shows the same area twenty-six years later. Anyone can see that much of the rainforest has been destroyed, but how much is “much”?
Now look at this:
(Photo credit: CDC) |
Are these blood cells healthy? Do any of them show signs of leukemia? It would take an expert doctor a few minutes to tell. Multiply those minutes by the number of people who need to be screened. There simply aren’t enough human doctors in the world to check everyone.
This is where computers come in. Computer programs can measure the differences between two pictures and count the number of oddly shaped platelets in a blood sample. Geneticists use programs to analyze gene sequences; statisticians, to analyze the spread of diseases; geologists, to predict the effects of earthquakes; economists, to analyze fluctuations in the stock market; and climatologists, to study global warming. More and more scientists are writing programs to help them do their work. In turn, those programs are making entirely new kinds of science possible.
Of course, computers are good for a lot more than just science. We used computers to write this book. Your smartphone is a pretty powerful computer; you’ve probably used one today to chat with friends, check your lecture notes, or look for a restaurant that serves pizza and Chinese food. Every day, someone figures out how to make a computer do something that has never been done before. Together, those “somethings” are changing the world.
This book will teach you how to make computers do what you want them to do. You may be planning to be a doctor, a linguist, or a physicist rather than a full-time programmer, but whatever you do, being able to program is as important as being able to write a letter or do basic arithmetic.
We begin in this chapter by explaining what programs and programming are. We then define a few terms and present some useful bits of information for course instructors.