Introduction

You want to learn how to program. Smart! Programming is a job in high demand, with a high salary and many opportunities. Or maybe it’s just a hobby, a skill you’d like to understand. Or maybe you like gaming and want to create your own games.

Whatever your reason, this is the right place to start. I will not bore you with endless details about which word to use, where to place some obscure symbol, or whatever. I will not force a language or structure upon you.

Instead, it’s all about ..

• What can a computer do? And what can it not do?
• How do we take any problem and find a simple solution?
• And how do we combine those two things to make computers perform … magic?

I like to summarize that with three quotes.

• “Computers are stupid.”
• “Computers don’t care about your feelings.”
• “Computers easily beat humans at one thing every time: computing”

If you ask a computer do so something silly … it will happily oblige. It will even calculate what you asked in no time at all! So programming is all about knowing how to ask the computer to spend its time calculating the right thing, in a smart way.

I’ll use my own simple language for the examples. I designed it to read like (simple) English sentences. It only has the absolute essentials for programming and nothing else. But most of all: it’s interactive, so you can try out the stuff you learn immediately!

Below is an example of this.

Why? Because most tutorials focus waaaay too much on syntax and details. Which causes new coders to spend all their time just memorizing symbols and specific words. But that’s the easy part! That’s the part you’re allowed to forget, because you can just Google syntax! The hard—but crucial—part of coding is actually solving problems and understanding computers.

Thanks to my basic language (“Bamboo”), this course can focus completely on that.