LaunchSchool.com prepatory work

'Learn to Program' by Chris Pine

Exercises and useful quotes.

Programming is telling your computer how to do something. Large tasks must be broken up into smaller tasks, which must be broken up into still smaller tasks, down until you get to the most basic tasks that you don’t have to describe—the tasks your computer already knows how to do. (These are really basic things such as arithmetic or displaying some text on your screen.)

My biggest problem when I was learning to program was that I was trying to learn it backwards. I knew what I wanted the computer to do and tried working backward from that, breaking it down until I got to something the computer knew how to do. Bad idea. I didn’t really know what the computer could do, so I didn’t know what to break the problem down to.

A program is not built; it is grown. Because a program is always growing and always changing, it must be written with change in mind.

DRY - Don't Repeat Yourself

A good programmer cultivates the virtue of laziness. Save yourself work whenever possible. If making a few changes now means you’ll be able to save yourself more work later, do it! Make your program a place where you can do the absolute minimum amount of work to get the job done.