There is no magic to computer programming or computers. Computers aren't smart. The only thing they are good at is doing what we tell them to do. You could add the numbers 1 to 10,000 by hand but it would take you a while. Computers can do the same thing, just quicker.
This is going to be a series of tutorials to demonstrate the basics of computer programming. When we get to the last in the series of tutorials we are going write a version of the classic video game Breakout.
To program you really only need to learn 3 things:
- The programming language syntax
- Basic programming constructs
- Think logically
If you are hoping this will be a comprehensive tutorial that goes over all aspects of Java and software engineering you will be extremely disappointed. This tutorial just teaches the basics. Enough to create the game later on.
There are hundreds of programming languages out there. Like spoken languages, each has its own grammer or syntax.
For these tutorials we are going to use the Java programming language. Java has been around since the mid-1990s and I've chosen this language for the tutorials for a few reasons:
- It's freely available.
- It runs on any operating system. Windows, Mac, Android etc..
- There are free Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) such as IntelliJ that make development easier.
- It's what is called a typed language. This will be explained shortly.
- It has a built-in graphics library which we will use when we write Breakout.
As mentioned above we are going to use Java and IntelliJ for these tutorials. I'm not going to explain how to install those components here because someone has already put together a tutorial on how to do that on Youtube. So go ahead and do that then come back here.
Once you've install Java and IntelliJ you can move on to the tutorial's index page and work through the rest of it.