Category: Programming

Fundamentals of Programming: Part 7 – Loops

by
Inf

Welcome to Part 7: Loops! I hope you have enjoyed the previous parts and if you haven’t checked them yet, you should! Here’s a link to Part 1!

In this part, we consider another fundamental building blocks of programs: Loops. What are they? Simply, a method for telling your computer to do the same thing a bunch of times. Nothing too hard huh? Let’s get on with it!

Continue Reading »

Fundamentals of Programming: Part 6 – Conditions

by
Inf

Welcome again! In this series, we go on to the first of the essential building blocks of programming: conditions. This is the first part of the series that starts to deal with blocks of code, as opposed to just independent lines. So without delay, let’s start.

In this long series, we’ll cover condition blocks using if-else and if-else if-else. We cover checks using AND, or and NOT (! symbol). We finally end with the switch statement. I doubt you’ll be able to grasp everything in one go as a beginner, so go slow, maybe a section at a time, try to understand how it works before moving on.

Continue Reading »

Fundamentals of Programming: Part 5 – Data Types

by
Inf

Hello! Continuing with the Fundamentals of Programming series, we will now look at what Data Types are. If you have not read the earlier series, now would be a good time to start. You can click here go to Part 1.

What are Data Types? Well, they are a way for you to tell the computer what kind of data you are referring to. In English, you have two basic kinds of data types: numbers and letters. To a computer, those would be “char” and “integer”. Char is short for “character” and integer means a whole number, without fractions or decimal points.

Unlike humans, computers are not so intelligent (yet!) and need to be told exactly what kind of data they are dealing with. For us, numbers are “3” and “3.24”. For a computer, you’d need to specify “integer” for whole numbers, “float” or “double” for decimal numbers and even specify the sign! Talk about smart!

Continue Reading »

Fundamentals of Programming: Part 4 – Variables and Arrays

by
Inf

Welcome to Part 4 where we will talk about variables and arrays are. If you’ve read the previous 3 parts, you would have noticed that I’ve used a few variables already, like A, B, Tc and Tf for example. In this section, we go deeper into what variables are, how to use them and finally, how to cope with situations where you have lots of variables to use, or don’t really know how many you need in fact! Knowing such details would be ideal if you want to pursue a tech career in the near future. In fact, there are tons of career options available online. That’s why as early as possible, it’s  also advisable to learn their distinctions such as data analyst vs. data scientist.

So let’s begin this fairly short part, shall we?

Continue Reading »

Fundamentals of Programming: Part 3 – Style, Indentation and Comments

by
Inf

Welcome to Part 3 of the multi-post series on Fundamentals of Programming. Last time, I just touched upon one very important point regarding style in programming: indentation. In this series, we’ll see a bit more about styles in programming. You can think of those as the “formatting” used in programming. We’ll end with the importance of conventions, comments and consistency in programming. I hope you will enjoy this part and learn something.

Continue Reading »

Fundamentals of Programming: Part 2 – Pseudo Code and Batch Jobs

by
Inf

Hello, welcome to Part 2 of the series. In this section, we’ll start with some actual code writing. “Code” is a short term to refer to “programming lines” i.e. instructions. So when someone is “coding”, they’re actually “writing programs”. I’ll use that word for short.

We’ll start with writing some instructions in pseudo-code. What is pseudo-code? Does it mean pseudo-programming? Yes, sort of.

You want to make sure you understand how to write and understand pseudo-code because that’s what I’ll be using through the rest of this series. They’re easy, English-like statement so don’t worry too much.

Continue Reading »

Fundamentals of Programming: Part 1 – Introduction

by
Inf

Hello there! Welcome to my Fundamentals of Programming series of post. In this series, I will teach you about the basics of programming, i.e. the building blocks and what makes a program tick. I will NOT teach you Java, C++, PHP, Python or whatever pretty language you can think of. Instead, I’ll keep it language-independent so that even a complete beginner to programming will be able to follow.

Continue Reading »