Beginning Programming in 24 Hours, Sams Teach Yourself

If you want to learn computer 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
Structure programs for readability
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