Introduction to Programming

hello again as you know I am Eli the computer guy over here for every man I t-dot-com and today's class is introduction to programming so programming is Wiener you sit down at a computer you you type out a lot of text or such and that turns into Angry Birds or QuickBooks or office or an entire operating system if you are going to be in the technology field you do not have to be an expert programmer but you should understand how to do some programming so so whenever you think about programming you know when most people

think about programming again they think about Windows 7 or office or QuickBooks or these really big massive programs well in reality like like with what I use you can create very small programs in order to do very specific tasks so right now you know the videos that you watch on everyman IT are provided to you from a little 15 line script that I wrote so I wrote this little 15 line script with some things called variables in it and whenever you come to one of our pages that has a video posted on our page on

that little 15 line piece of code runs and you can watch our videos so what I want you to understand is you know when you do programming yes you can create these massive Windows 7 operating systems etc etc etc but the reality is is you can create much smaller programs to do very specific tasks and that can be very very useful for you as a technician so so when I worked back for one of the enterprise companies we had 200 new servers that were going in we were installing 200 new servers for our server farm

well every single one of those servers needed a little edit to the registry to allow something to happen so again I was able to write I don't know a 5 or 10 line script that would literally go out and on every single server it would automatically kink that little that registry key in order for in order for us to do what we needed to be done so so when you're thinking about programming again don't always think about the big stuff there's a lot of little things that you can do so with this class today we're

not going to be you know going into actually writing functions and all that kind of stuff we're just going to be going over the basic things that you have to understand if you are thinking about programming so we're going to be talking about things like programming languages we're going to talk about the difference between compiled and the scripted languages we're going to be talking about API s and SDKs prototyping pseudocode the types of programmers so if you're interested in becoming a programmer there are different types of programmers out there so we'll talk about that and

then we'll wrap up with some final thoughts so this that you know don't don't worry you know you don't you don't have to to put your thinking cap on this is going to be a very easy class we're just going to go do an overview of what programming is and give you some of the basic concepts that you have to understand before you start programming yourself so let's talk about programming languages so so most people when they think of programmers they just think that any programmer can program anything like programmers are programmers programmers program yeah

that's kind of what they think you know if you know how to do programming you can do anything well just like every other profession in technology programming is actually divided into a lot of different sub professions or sub careers the reason is is because basically what programming does is you as a programmer write out in a type of code that's called human readable so you type out you know if x equals 2 then print 12 you know you you type out what you want to have happen and then the programming language then it turns that

into something that the computer can do something with so so you type in what's called a human readable language and then the either the compiler or the script interpreter turns that into ones and zeros that the computers can understand so remember a computer only understands on and off 1 & 0 it does not understand if then loop x equals it doesn't understand that it understands on and understands off so what you're doing is you create your programming something called human readable and then that gets turned into ones and zeros now when it gets turned into

ones and zeros different programming languages allow this to happen in different ways so if you want let's say create a device drivers so you're going to create a driver for a modem you would probably use something called C plus that is used for doing device drivers if you were going to create a web database application you would use a programming language called PHP so this particular language is best suited for for sending and pulling data from a database so think about programming languages the way you would think about any other program that you use on

the computer so you would not go and do QuickBooks to write a report you probably even couldn't even do it if you wanted to just like with programming languages you could not write a device driver with PHP PHP is used for web-based database applications that's all that can be used for you can't use it to write device drivers it simply can't do that I mean the same is true you wouldn't go into word to draw a picture it's just not built for that so when we're talking about programming language is is again programming languages are

like any other application you would use on the computer each programming language is used to do a specific type of program so PHP is used for for you know I say web-based database applications you can program for flash so you know all those fancy graphics that you see on websites there's a programming language that allows you to interact with those things if you wanted to create an application like QuickBooks or something like Word you might use a programming language called a visual basic or the visual studio if you were going to be trying to create

programs that are that are cross-platform you know they can run on Linux and they can rack we're on a Mac and they can run on Windows you might use a programming language called Java why because Java allows you to do that so the main thing that I want you to understand with these programming languages is each programming language is designed to do a certain set of functions very well so when you are deciding to write your program basically what you have to do is you have to decide what you want your program to do and

then once you've figured it out what you want it to do then you figure out the language that you need to learn or you need to use in order to create the program so so don't think you know oh I'm going to learn PHP and then I'm going to write my own operating system PHP again it just doesn't do it and the main thing with programming language is to understand is what you're going to be doing is you're going to be taking what is called human readable code so you actually type out with a text

editor or these compilers you type out what you want the code to do and then that compiler or what's called an interpreter turns that into ones and zeroes ons and offs that that's all the computer cares about so that's the basic thing to understand with programming languages a lot of people get confused remember just like any other application a programming language is built to do specific tasks you would not use QuickBooks to write a report you would not use Microsoft Word to draw a picture it's just not built that way same way programming languages PHP

web database applications HTML creating webpages java creates cross-platform programs so the next terms that you should understand when we're talking about programming languages are compiled programming languages and scripted programming languages so what does this mean well basically compiled programming languages are the oldest programming languages and basically what happens is you write out your code you know if this happens then do this print this etc etc etc you then open up a compiler so a compiler is an application it's a piece of software you'll have on your computer you then feed the compiler your so source

code so that human readable code that you've just created you feed that to the compiler the compiler turns that into ones and zeros that the computer understands and then it spits out a program on the other side so an executable file so you put in all this text the the compiler turns all that text into ones and zeros and spits out an executable program so that program you can then double click or however you run it on your computer and it will run that way it is now a compiled program that's what compilers do they

turn human readable text into compile programs then there are scripting languages with scripting languages do is you don't actually compile the code so you write out all of your code so you know if this happens then do this then print this you write that out you then simply put that text on to the server or computer that is going to be running the code you install something called an interpreter onto the computer and then that interpreter reads the code and then spits out the results to whoever is using the program so if you ever hear

of batch files visual basic script JavaScript PHP HTML any of these types of programming languages you actually sit down at a text editor you write out all this text you put that file on to your server then let's say let's say we're talking about a PHP program so when I write PHP programs I write out all the text literally in notepad I then upload that to my web server with a file Association of dot PHP on my web server I have P HP installed so when somebody goes to my PHP script that PHP interpreter reads

the file and then does whatever it is that the file says should happen so the main thing to understand when you're talking about compiled languages or scripted languages compiled languages mean you take all that human readable code you dump it into the compiler it spits out an executable file so the file that spits out you know that's all just ones and zeros scripted languages everything remains as text you install an interpreter onto the computer that is going to be running in that scripted language so you install PHP Visual Basic or windows script host something like

that onto the computer and then when you run the program that interpreter will read the code that you've given it and then provide you with the results so so this is something to understand but between compiled and scripted computer languages now the next terms I'm sure you've heard a lot about you know if you've been following the the technology industry lately are api's and SDKs so ap is our application programming interfaces SDKs or software development kits what are these and why are these important to you well companies let's say Facebook or Twitter or tumblr or

any of these types of things they do very specific things and in order to grow their influence in the world they want you a ver to be able to create programs that can can either push or pull data to their sites so like with with with Twitter Twitter is the the most popular one for api's so you can create a program that either sends posts to Twitter so it shows up on Twitter or polls post from Twitter to show up in whatever web-based application that you are creating well the way that your program can do

this is through something called api's application programming interfaces so so what this is is twitter or facebook or myspace or any of this you know they have a closed environment they have a secret sauce when you create a post on to Twitter you create the post use hit submit and then it goes off to Twitter and something happens magic happens right and then you know it shows up on on your home page well the thing is Twitter to prevent hacking and to prevent problems they don't want to tell anybody about the secret sauce they don't

want to tell anybody how their program actually works so what they do is they create what are called a pee eyes and these are basically points where your program can connect to their program and they can exchange data so basically any of these api's that are created you can interact with if they're not created you can't get behind their wall so basically let's like Twitter you can do a basic program that would say you know write or print the last post from Eli computer guy and so you would write out a line of code that

would basically say last post from Eli computer guy and print on my particular website so what happens is you can interact with those those api's have called application programming interfaces you don't get into their secret sauce you can simply push and pull certain data the main thing to understand with these api's is is one the vendor you know Facebook Twitter whatever can change these api's anytime they want so twitter has done this a couple of times to everybody chagrin the other thing is like I say you have to play by their rules so whether you're

dealing with Google or Twitter etc they will come up with their rulebook and they will tell you how you can interact with those api's and those are the only ways that you can interact with with whatever it is that they're doing the next thing is SDKs or software development kits a lot like api's but basically so we have these new devices coming out iphones ipads i this I that zooms whatever basically what SDKs are or are their kits that allow you to be able to program for the device that you're trying to program for so

they come with a lot of special tools they come with things like what are called emulators so emulators are kind of like like fake devices so you can have a like a little Android phone pop up on your computer and you can create a program for that little fake Android phone to make sure that it works properly you know if I push this button what will happen so these software development kits basically what they do is they package all the information and all the tools that you need in order to program for a device and

they well they either give it to you or they they sell it to you depending on who you're dealing with sometimes like for the Android system the SDKs are completely free for other systems they're they're gonna cost you quite a bit of money but basically the the SDKs software development kits are kits that allow you to program for particular devices so again api's SDKs at this point you don't have to worry about them a lot but it's good to understand so the next thing I want to talk about is the first step in the programming

process so you've thought about what program you want to create let's say you want to create some kind of web application well after you thought that you want to start creating some web application you are going to want to do prototyping so what prototyping is is where you sit down and on plain old pieces of paper or with something a program like Visio or such you sit there and you actually sketch out what you want the program to do so basically let's say where we have a program that we want to collect people's email addresses

you know it's kind of like you know with you everyman IT comm here we have a little newsletter link if you want our newsletter you put in the email address you click Submit and that submits the data into our database so if we're going to prototype this on a piece of paper or on a whiteboard we would simply you know draw out and we would say okay I want to have a box and I want the box to have an email address no place for somebody put an email address and above it it'll say email

and below it it will say submit and I write it out like I say on a piece of paper or on a whiteboard like this then if this is what's going to happen then I would write out here and I would just put for you know when you hit submit that then goes into the database and that's all you do basically with prototyping you literally on a piece of paper right out or draw out how you want this application to work and you write it out so that later you can have an idea of how

you were actually going to be programming this thing the biggest problem with programming is that most people don't understand what they actually want to do so so they get you know they they sit down and they write half a program and they find out that that what they written isn't going to end up doing what they want to do so they scrap that and then they write another half a program then find out that's not what they want to do so they scrap that we're in another program basically the first thing that you want to

do is do prototyping where you draw everything out so that you understand what you want this application do like I say even even this little email thing here this can probably take five or six pages just to write out how everything is going to work so for this let's say this is this is the the submit the email so they put in their email address you hit submit and it goes to the database well then if we have a report section so let's say I want an admin page and then under that I would have

a report button and if I click the report button that would have to go to the database and then that would have to print out a report with all the email addresses in it basically this can get really confusing and we're going to go into this more as we actually start creating programs but the main thing to understand is all prototype enos is on a whiteboard or a piece of paper you actually just simply draw out there's there's no complicated stuff here you simply draw out how you want this program to work so once we've

drawn out the prototype of how we want our little program to work we need to start working on something called pseudocode so what is pseudocode pseudocode is when you simply write out longhand how you want the program to function how you want different operations to happen so let's say we're talking about this newsletter program again so we have this text box and we have the submit button right so basically if we're going to write pseudocode for the submit button so we want to say when I click the submit button what do I want to have

happen so we would say when I click Submit email address and text box should be added to the email database so basically all we do is rewrite out like that like I said like this in longhand we write out what we want this what we want to have happen when we click Submit when I click the submit button the email address and the tax book should be added to the email database this does two things for us one it makes us start thinking about the process that we want to have happen before we actually get

into the code actually writing out the code and it allows us to decide what programming language we're going to be using so if this is going to be a web based application going to and do a database I can say we will probably be using the PHP programming language you know if I write all this out I know it's not gonna be Java Script I know it's not going to be HTML we're gonna get into that later but basically by writing the pseudocode I can say okay the programming language is I'm going to need is

PHP the other thing again as we go into the more advanced topics with doing programming is by writing this out before we're worried about the poor actually programming in the language it's easier to understand the logical ideas of what are going be happening in this process so when you write it out like I say you can think you can simply think about what you want to have happen and you're not actually thinking about code right now so this is very important so basically the next step in the process what you do the first thing is

you you think about what you want to create you come up with an idea hey I wish I could get people's email addresses then you create prototyping where you actually you know like I say on a whiteboard or pieces of paper you draw out what you want to have happen then after that for each thing that you want to have happen you would then write pseudocode and pseudocode like I say is just you just write out longhand what you want to have happen now past this is where we'll get into actual classes on programming so

we'll have classes on PHP and JavaScript in HTML so past this is then where you turn this idea into an actual program into an actual application so this is as far as we're gonna go today like I say more advanced classes we're gonna talk about more but these these are very very important steps like I say too many people don't spend enough time on prototyping too many people don't spend enough time on pseudocode and if you don't write out what you want to have happen then it's really really difficult to actually program this stuff later

so the final subject we're going to talk about today are the types of programmers out there because like I say you know everybody when they come into the the technology field or the computer field they say you know I want to do computers you know I want to do programming and they don't realize that there are a lot of sub professions in the technology field so you know if you're gonna come into computers you know IT information technology like I do well you can fix computers or you could fix servers or you could do networking

or you can do telephone systems or you do surveillance systems or you know there's a whole bunch of stuff that all requires its own skill set the same is true with programmers a programmer is not a programmer they all program but they all do different things so the first type of programmer and probably the easiest one for you to get into is what is called a web programmer so so when you go to a web site and all these kind of fancy stuff happens on the website that is something that a web programmer does so

basically web programmers program applications that run on the web things like grabbing people's email addresses you know presenting websites in a certain way that kind of stuff this type of thing you can learn at home and you can actually produce real professional stuff like I say just just right out of your house with no real professional training you just get a few books you understand how all of it works and you can go out there and you can start and become your own web programmer the next type of programmer is more like the programmer programmer

the the programmers that you would be thinking about these people you know would be creating things like device drivers very complicated programs so basically with a web programmer you can create a web program in a couple of hours maybe a week maybe two weeks you know if you just sit down and do it it usually does not take that long for most web programs programmer programmers if you're creating things like device drivers for a modem or for a video card you're creating applications like Quickbook Microsoft Office those things take a lot of time so programmers

are the guys that just stand or sit in front of a monitor for eight to ten hours a day drinking their jolt colas and just just writing code so so those are the people like the the real serious programmers you know that's what they're like they would be learning programming languages like C plus C sharp Java etc then beyond programmers that are the highest level of what are called software engineers so you know when you're creating one little program that takes a lot of skill and it takes a lot of energy well when you create

massive pieces of software you actually need a lot of engineering you need project management skills in order to make this happen so software engineers will be working on like these large cluster computers things like that so this is basically just just a simple idea to give you that there are different types of programmers again you have the web programmers you can learn this stuff at home you can create professional stuff you know out of your bedroom on your laptop computer there's programmer programmers for this you probably need a college education you know she'd go off

and get a computer science degree this will allow you to create the programs that you're used to thinking about again device drivers QuickBooks that kind of stuff and then there's the software engineer software engineers create big programs I mean programs a spawn span you know multiple systems multiple servers you know clusters of computers etc so that was a class introduction to programming so you know if you are interested if you're thinking about doing programming these are the basic concepts that you need to understand before you actually jump in to doing programming you know people want

to jump in and they want to learn PHP or C+ or or all these different programming languages before they really understand what programming is about the main thing that I want you to understand with programming is just like every other fast set of computers or technology there's different sub careers of programmers and the different programming languages are built to do different things if you spend a year learning to do I know C+ programming that's not gonna help you create web database applications it's simply not what it's built for you know you could spend six months

learning PHP but that's not gonna help you build device drivers if that's what you want to do you know if you want to create robots PHP isn't what's going to teach you to do that so every programming language is like an application that you would use on your normal computer just like window just like like word or just like QuickBooks different programming languages are built to do specific things you would not use QuickBooks to try to write a report for school it's simply not built that for that again you would not use PHP to write

a device driver you would not use C+ to write a web-based application those programming languages simply are not built to do those things we talked about the compiled versus the scripted languages so compiled is where you take the source code that human readable code you shove it into a compiler and then it spits out this executable file with ones and zeros so it compiles your your source code into a program versus a scripted language where your source source code always remains a text file so you upload a text file to your server you install the

interpreter onto your server and then the interpreter reads the code and then spits out the results so again like I say on on our web server it has PHP installed I upload PHP code to the web server when you come to our website the interpreter reads the PHP code and then gives you the results we talked about SP ap is an SDK is a little bit Haitian programming interfaces and software development kits application programming interfaces are the points that companies like Twitter Facebook Yahoo Google give you in order to connect with their systems so so

they have a whole secret recipe for how things happen in their systems and they don't want you messing around with that so what they do is they give you these api's that allow you to do specific tasks so if you want to post a post to Twitter from any different application that application would connect to Twitter through an API that will allow that post to happen if you want to read posts from Twitter on a different application that application would go to that API and then pull the post off of Twitter the main thing to

understand with these api's is you get what the company gives you so Facebook Twitter has done this a couple of times they can change these api's at any time it's all up to them they can give you more or less access basically you know by flipping a coin it's all up to them you don't get any control over what happens in their systems then the SDKs again you've probably heard about a lot nowadays is called software development kits so if you're going to be creating applications like I say for the iPhone the iPad Android devices

zooms whatever whatever it is you're gonna build they have SDKs basically these are packaged programming applications that allow you to create programs for those specific devices we then talked about prototyping so this is the first step in creating a program no technical skills required you don't you don't need to know anything other than then how to to write on a piece of paper so with prototyping what you do is you think about what you want your program to do and then you actually write or draw that out on pieces of paper or a whiteboard so

you draw it out so you have an idea of what this thing is supposed to look like once you have done the prototype you then go into pseudocode so what pseudocode is is you know any where you have little buttons on this this these prototype paper you would then say when i click this button this is what i want to have happen by writing that pseudocode you start to logically understand what is supposed to be happening with your system better and that allows you to decide what programming language you were going to be using and

then it's easier to figure out logical problems when you're not actually writing in the programming language itself you know when you're just writing a freehand after that we talked about the different types of programmers you know web programmers programmers programmer software engineers again with this just like programming languages I want you to understand the career of being a programmer has different subcategories you know again programmers are not programmers you don't say I want to be a programmer and then you can do everything it's not how it works if you want to create web data based

applications you learn one set of programming if you want to create robots you learn another satellite programming if you want to like start creating artificial intelligence you know fuzzy logic that has you know neural networks that has an entirely different set of programming you know it takes a lot of time and energy to learn any one of those sets so you should understand that you know they are different career fields so that was a class introduction to programming again not too technical or any of that our next classes are going to start delving into things

like programming in PHP and JavaScript and HTML and that's where you'll get your hands into the code but right now you just need to understand these basic concepts so when we go to writing code you have an idea of what you're doing