ckckckck.com - Learn to Program in Java From Scratch

Computer programming or “coding” is the act of writing an accurate set of instructions that tell the hardware what to do.  This set of instructions is reffered to as source code, and can be read and editted by humans.  Even though source code is human readable, it is not written in english, french, or spanish.  Instead it can be written in any of the hundreds of programming languages in existance today.   For this site we are going to learn to write our source code in the Java programming language.

The good news is that it is actually much easier to learn a programming language than a foreign language (OK, that’s just an opinion.)  Programming languages have much less “words” that you need to be concered with, and generally involve much less typing.  Both programming languages as well as traditional languages have what we call syntax.  Java syntax can be thought of as the “rules” and “grammar” of the programming language.  For instance, in the English language we end our sentences with one of the following charecters: ( ?,  . , ! )  In the Java language, we end all “sentances” with a semicolon ( ; ).

So, if humans can read source code, what can computers read?  The answer is byte code. Byte code is the storied “computers can only talk in 1’s and 0’s” that you have probably heard of.  Humans typically will not deal with byte code.  So you may be asking yourself this question…If humans understand source code, and computers understand byte code, how can I write an accurate set of instructions for the computer, we don’t even speak the same language!  Easy, thats what the compiler is for.

The compiler is a computer program that will take your source code, and turn it into byte code that the computer can understand.  Think of the compiler as a translater, translating what you say in English into French, so that your friend from France can understand you.

Source code, the compiler, and byte code in action!

New Terms Summary:

1. Source Code – The human readable instructions that we will write, telling the computer hardware what to do.
2. Syntax - The rules and grammer of a programming language which we will use when writing source code.
3. Byte Code – The non-human readable code, which the computer understands.  This code is created by the compiler.
4. Compiler – The “translator” which can convert the source code you write, into machine-understandable byte code.