Beginning Programming

The book I read to research this post was Beginning Programming for Dummies by Wallace Wang which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. A friend of mine who used to have a sinclair spectrum and learned to program in basic and pascal told me he used to buy computer magazines. These had the programs written out & at first he copied them out, then started changing things and gradually got proficient in them languages. This book is a kind of tutorial in a simplified form of basic which I'm not going to go into here. There are more computer languages than spoken languages in the world. There's even one based on the klingon language used in star trek. Many of these languages have different strengths and weaknesses. Windows and similiar programs are written in one of the C languages which can be read on any machine with slight modifications. Some languages like Visual Basic need a small program to interpret them on a computer. AppleMacs tend to use AppleScript. Some languages like Prolog & Lisp are suitable for artificial intelligence and feature advanced decision making functions. The native language of a computer is machine code which is too complex for people to write in. The language you write in has to be translated. HTML is used for websites and plugins are done in java and javascript. Some languages like SQL require a database. Often a programmer will be fluent in several languages but sometimes he will do part of a program in one language and then someone else will use another language to do the rest. Once you learn one language it makes it easier to learn another but it takes a while to become proficient.