Foundations of Programming: Fundamentals

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Introduction

4m 15s
1. Welcome
  
  1m 17s
2. Making the most of this course
  
  2m 8s
3. Using the exercise files
  
  50s
1. Programming Basics

22m 11s
1. What is programming?
  
  5m 45s
2. What is a programming language?
  
  4m 48s
3. Writing source code
  
  5m 34s
4. Compiled and interpreted languages
  
  6m 4s
2. Core Programming Syntax

16m 29s
1. Why JavaScript?
  
  4m 45s
2. Creating your first program in JavaScript
  
  6m 54s
3. Requesting input
  
  4m 50s
3. Variables and Data Types

31m 38s
1. Introduction to variables and data types
  
  5m 16s
2. Understanding strong, weak, and duck-typed languages
  
  3m 51s
3. Working with numbers
  
  5m 4s
4. Using characters and strings
  
  4m 5s
5. Working with operators
  
  4m 47s
6. Properly using white space
  
  6m 46s
7. Adding comments to code for human understanding
  
  1m 49s
4. Writing Conditional Code

24m 48s
1. Building with the if statement
  
  7m 35s
2. Working with complex conditions
  
  4m 9s
3. Setting comparison operators
  
  6m 59s
4. Using the switch statement
  
  6m 5s
5. Modular Code

17m 54s
1. Breaking your code apart
  
  4m 1s
2. Creating and calling functions
  
  2m 56s
3. Setting parameters and arguments
  
  6m 7s
4. Understanding variable scope
  
  2m 23s
5. Splitting code into different files
  
  2m 27s
6. Iteration: Writing Loops

13m 31s
1. Introduction to iteration
  
  4m 28s
2. Writing a while statement
  
  5m 24s
3. Creating a for loop
  
  3m 39s
7. More About Strings

19m 28s
1. Cleaning up with string concatenation
  
  4m 30s
2. Finding patterns in strings
  
  8m 3s
3. Introduction to regular expressions
  
  6m 55s
8. Collections

19m 58s
1. Working with arrays
  
  5m 46s
2. Array behavior
  
  5m 29s
3. Iterating through collections
  
  5m 18s
4. Collections in other languages
  
  3m 25s
9. Programming Style

10m 50s
1. Programming style
  
  5m 55s
2. Writing pseudocode
  
  4m 55s
10. Input and Output

25m 55s
1. Input/output and persistence
  
  3m 6s
2. Reading and writing from the DOM
  
  8m 11s
3. Event driven programming
  
  7m 47s
4. Introduction to file I/O
  
  6m 51s
11. When Things Go Wrong

24m 25s
1. Introduction to debugging
  
  5m 57s
2. Tracing through a section of code
  
  7m 5s
3. Understanding error messages
  
  3m 21s
4. Using debuggers
  
  8m 2s
12. Introduction to Object Orientation

14m 16s
1. Introduction to object-oriented languages
  
  5m 18s
2. Using classes and objects
  
  6m 28s
3. Reviewing object-oriented languages
  
  2m 30s
13. Advanced Topics

11m 14s
1. Memory management across languages
  
  5m 11s
2. Introduction to algorithms
  
  4m 2s
3. Introduction to multithreading
  
  2m 1s
14. Exploring the Languages

29m 20s
1. Introduction to languages
  
  1m 42s
2. C-based languages
  
  4m 40s
3. The Java world
  
  3m 13s
4. .NET languages: C# and Visual Basic .NET
  
  6m 17s
5. Ruby
  
  3m 4s
6. Python
  
  2m 56s
7. Objective-C
  
  4m 3s
8. Libraries and frameworks
  
  3m 25s
Conclusion

1m 2s
1. Where to go from here
  
  1m 2s

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Watch the Online Video Course Foundations of Programming: Fundamentals

4h 47m Beginner Sep 22, 2011

This course provides the core knowledge to begin programming in any language. Simon Allardice uses JavaScript to explore the core syntax of a programming language, and shows how to write and execute your first application and understand what's going on under the hood. The course covers creating small programs to explore conditions, loops, variables, and expressions; working with different kinds of data and seeing how they affect memory; writing modular code; and how to debug, all using different approaches to constructing software applications.

Finally, the course compares how code is written in several different languages, the libraries and frameworks that have grown around them, and the reasons to choose each one.

Topics include:

Writing source code
Understanding compiled and interpreted languages
Requesting input
Working with numbers, characters, strings, and operators
Writing conditional code
Making the code modular
Writing loops
Finding patterns in strings
Working with arrays and collections
Adopting a programming style
Reading and writing to various locations
Debugging
Managing memory usage
Learning about other languages

Subjects:: Developer Web
Author:: Simon Allardice

Welcome

Hi! I am Simon Allardice and welcome to the Foundations of Programming: Fundamentals course. What we are exploring here are the core ideas and skills you will always need when programming on any platform with any language. Now there are dozens of programming languages you could choose from and we will see many of them in this course, languages like JavaScript, C, Ruby and Python. We will see what these different languages are good at and why you might pick one over another, but I won't be trying to make you an expert on any one of them. Instead in this course we will go through what's common across all of these languages.

We will work with things like loops, conditions, variables, and memory; see how to control the structure and the flow of a program; and what you need to know about what that program is doing under the hood. And we are going to make sense of the buzzwords and jargon that you can't avoid when programming. These words might not mean anything to you right now, but they will. And we won't just talk ideas. We will get hands-on on and write programs in this course to prove these ideas and see why they are important. So that by the end of this course you would be comfortable with approaching any programming language.

Welcome to the Foundations of Programming: Fundamentals. Let's get started.

Find answers to the most frequently asked questions about Foundations of Programming: Fundamentals .

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Q: Using TextEdit with Mac OS 10.9 Mavericks?: A: If you're using the built-in TextEdit program in Mavericks to write your first examples and your code doesn't seem to be working, here's one reason why: by default, "smart quotes" are now turned on in TextEdit Preferences.

This is where TextEdit will automatically change pairs of double quotes to "smart quotes" - where the opening and closing quote are different, like a 66 and 99.

While this is fine for human eyes, programming languages don't want this - when writing code, they need to be the plain, generic straight-up-and-down quotes.

So make sure that in TextEdit > Preferences, that "Smart quotes" are unchecked.

Important! Whenever you make a change to TextEdit preferences, make sure to then completely quit out of the program (Command-Q or using TextEdit > Quit TextEdit) and then re-open it, as changes won't take effect on documents you already have open.

However, we're not finished - just because you've changed the preferences, it does **not** change any *existing* smart quotes back to "regular" quotes - it just doesn't add new ones - so make sure to go through your files for any time you wrote quotes and TextEdit may have changed them to smart quotes - look in both the JavaScript, and your HTML too, and compare to the downloadable exercise files if necessary.

If that sounds like a bit of a chore, I recommend just downloading a code editor like Sublime Text (www.sublimetext.com) or TextMate (www.macromates.com) and using that instead of TextEdit - it's only a matter of time before you'd move away from TextEdit anyway - we only used it in the course because it was built-in and a quick way to get started, but it's now become more of a inconvenience than it was before.