In order to learn how to swim, you must enter the water and start trying to row with your hands, helping yourself with your feet, then overcome fear, tear yourself away from the bottom and swim. There are similarities with writing programs. You can read a thick textbook, pass the test exam at the university, but you can’t even learn to write simple programs.
How much time to spend on training? Musicians say that to achieve mastery of the instrument, you need to rehearse four hours a day.
The programmer’s tool is a computer, so let’s briefly consider its device. All calculations in the computer are performed by the central processor.
Files with programs are stored in permanent memory (on the hard disk), and at the time of execution are loaded into temporary (random) memory. Entering information in
the computer is carried out using the keyboard (input device), and the output using the monitor (output device).
A computer is capable of working with only two types of signals: 1 or 0 (machine code). Write programs of the form
1010101010010101010 is difficult for a person, his thinking is structured differently, therefore translator programs appeared from a programming language that is understandable to humans, to a machine language that is understandable to a computer.
Programming languages that are close to the machine level are called low-level languages (for example, a language