About The Book
Computer Programming Can be Fun
This book is a radically different beginner's introduction to programming. The book was written with a complete beginner in mind and a complete beginner worked through it to test it. Francis chose the most unlikely candidate possible - a middle-aged female with a computer phobia and a hatred of maths and not only taught her to program but to actually enjoy it.
The CD contains everything you will need and soon you will be able to:
- Write menu-driven programs.
- Create your own lottery.
- Produce animation and moving objects.
- Create your own fonts.
- Write simulations (e.g. a weaving program).
- Discover the programmer within.
Contents
We are providing an extended table of contents to give you some idea about how the book is organised and what you can expect to learn by studying it.
Minimum System Requirements
Until we manage to find suitable development environments for other operating systems you will need a computer running Microsoft Windows 98/ME/2000/XP. Microsoft Windows 95 is probably OK but we have not tested the software we provide on a machine running it.
You will also need about a hundred megabytes of free space on your hard-drive for the software provided with the book and for the programs you will write while studying.
You will need at least 128Mbytes of RAM else the provided software will run very slowly. More would help but note that Microsoft operating systems earlier than XP cannot use more than 512Mbytes of RAM. If you put more in your machine will run more slowly, if you put in a Gigabyte or more it will not work.
We have not tested the software using a chip earlier than a Pentium 3 or equivalent. Other than likely slow performance we see no reason why it would not work with a Pentium 2 class CPU.
You will need to be able to use a screen resolution of at least 800 by 600 with 256 colors.
Any machine that is less than three years old (and many older ones) running Microsoft Windows will meet the above requirements.
Introduction and Preface
In deciding whether to invest your money and time in a book, you would probably read the Introduction and Preface to get an idea of its style and contents. To save a trip to the bookstore, you can download these sections here and study them at your leisure. They are taken directly from the final typeset pages and also show the general presentation style of the book. The two files are in PDF (Acrobat) format. If you do not already have an Acrobat PDF Reader you can get one free from Adobe (if you cannot see an Adobe icon, you have your browser set to suppress commercial links.)
Download PDF Introduction This file is 81 Kb.
Download PDF Preface This file is 46 Kb.
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