So You Want to Become a Programmer

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First Steps: Know Your Environment

  • ASCII
  • File extensions
  • Command-line
    • Commonalities between *nix and Windows shells
      • Spaces to separate arguments
      • PATH
    • Differences
      • Less need to modify PATH on *nix (/usr/bin and /usr/local/bin)
      • Running executables in current directory
    • Bridging the gap
      • Cygwin
  • Filesystem hierarchy

A Little Bit of Theory

  • Source code as simply text
  • Compilers/interpreters taking that and turning it into a format a machine can understand
  • Statements vs. Expressions
    • Removes bad "magic" from programming 
    • (+ (- 5 1) (/ 6 2))
      does not require special syntactic support, as opposed to 
      (+ 4 3)
  • Entry points (what order things are executed in)
    • Sometimes the program is just executed in order, and sometimes the entry point is specially delineated
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