Programming For Beginners

Audience

Anyone who is interested in learning computer programming but has no formal knowledge.

Prerequisites

Students should have basic computer skills.

Duration

1 day. Hands on.

Course Objectives

Computer programming is a broad subject, with many languages, design patterns and styles. For those that haven't done a computing degree, it can be hard to get started, with most commercial courses requiring prior programming knowledge of at least one language. This course offers a gateway into programming for those people without any formal training or experience. It covers theories and concepts that apply to modern programming languages. This is exercised practically using the popular high level scripting language Perl. Perl's flexible TIMTOWTDI design makes it ideal to demonstrate the various methodologies. The understanding gleaned can then be applied to other programming languages, or used as a foundation for further Perl education.

Course Content

Computer Concepts
CPU
Bits and Bytes
RAM and Persistent Storage
1GL
2GL
3GL

Programming Concepts
Variables
Constants
Statements
Flow
Blocks
Operations
Boolean logic
Conditionals
Loops/Iterators
State

Hands on with Perl
Why Perl?
Comments
Outputting data
Executing scripts

Scalars
Scalars as dynamically typed variables
Using Scalars
Working with Scalars
Interpolation
Joining strings
Repeating strings
Working with numbers

Arrays
Ordered list of Scalars
Defining
Joining
push/pop
shift/unshift
sorting

User input
Command line arguments
STDIN file handle
Random values

Conditionals
With boolean logic
if
elsif
else
unless

Hashes
As an associative array
Keys and values
Bag of keys
keys/values functions
delete

Loops
for/foreach
while
until

Task
Task definition
Example solution
- Prepare the file
- Logical steps
- Create code

Appetisers
Quotes/Quick quotes
Environment variables
Subroutines
Functions

Teaching yourself more
Online
- Sites
- Communities
Books