Beginning Programming in 24 Hours, Sams Teach Yourself (B&N Special Edition)

Learn Computer Programming in 24 One-Hour Lessons!

If you want to learn programming but don’t know which language to start with, this is the book for you! In just 24 lessons of one hour or less, any beginner can get a solid introduction to the basics of computer programming and learn to write simple programs for any platform—Windows, Mac, and mobile.

Using a straightforward, step-by-step approach, each lesson in this carefully crafted tutorial builds upon the previous one, allowing you to learn all the essentials of programming from the ground up.

Once you’ve mastered these fundamentals, the book introduces you to several of the most popular computer programming languages today and helps you decide which language to learn first.

• Step-by-step instructions carefully walk you through the most common programming tasks.
• Practical, hands-on examples show you how to apply what you learn to create your own programs
• Quizzes and exercises at the end of each lesson help you test your knowledge and stretch your skills

Learn how to…

• Set up your programming toolkit with widely available free downloads
• Create simple programs in JavaScript that get user input and display output
• Process numbers and words
• Use variables to hold information
• Merge strings together
• Tell programs how to make decisions
• Create algorithms to count data values and accumulate totals
• Use JavaScript to create interactive web pages
• Improve a user’s experience with cookies
• Debug your programs before going live
• Apply your programming skills to more advanced languages like Java
• Use object-oriented programming techniques
• Choose between other popular languages like C and C++, HTML5 and CSS3, Visual Basic and .NET, and PHP
• Distribute and sell your programs
• Create mobile web apps with HTML5
• Convert web apps to iOS or Android

Contents at a Glance

Part I - Start Programming Today
1 Hands-On Programming
2 Process and Techniques
3 Designing a Program
4 Getting Input and Displaying Output
5 Data Processing with Numbers and Words
6 Controlling Your Program
7 Debugging Tools

Part II - Programming Fundamentals
8 Structured Techniques
9 Programming Algorithms
10 Having Fun with Programming
11 Advanced Programming

Part III - Object-Oriented Programming with Java
12 Programming with Java
13 Java's Details
14 Java Has Class
15 Applets and Web Pages

Part IV - Other Programming Languages
16 HTML5 and CSS3
17 JavaScript and AJAX
18 Scripting with PHP
19 Programming with C and C++
20 Programming with Visual Basic 2012
21 C# and the .NET Framework

Part V - The Business of Programming
22 How Companies Program
23 Distributing Applications
24 The Future of Programming

Part VI - Creating Mobile Apps with HTML5, iOS, and Android (B&N Edition Bonus Chapters)
25 Building a Mobile Web Application
26 Converting HTML5 Apps to iOS and Android Apps

Appendixes
A Glossary
B Using the NetBeans IDE for Java
C ASCII Table