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