What You Need

All you need is your favorite development environment—or even one you’ve never used. This book is programming-language agnostic. Pick a language, grab that language’s reference guide, and dive in. Be warned though; the programming language you choose will determine how easy, or difficult, these programs are. For example, if you choose to do this book with Python or Ruby, then developing graphical user interfaces won’t be easy. And if you choose to use JavaScript in the browser, then working with external files and web services will be much more complex than with other languages. Your approach to problems will be much different if you choose a functional programming language over an object-oriented one. But that’s the real value of these exercises; they’ll help you learn a language and how that language is different from what you already know.

You should have an Internet connection so you can do some of the programs that use third-party services and participate in the community for this book.