The Secret Life Of Programs: Understand Computers -- Craft Better Code

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About The Secret Life Of Programs: Understand Computers

Product Description Reading books is a kind of enjoyment. Reading books is a good habit. We bring you a different kinds of books. You can carry this book where ever you want. It is easy to carry. It can be an ideal gift to yourself and to your loved ones. Care instruction keep away from fire. About the Author Jonathan E. Steinhart has designed graphics hardware and software, and built CAD systems, graphics workstations, circuit simulators, power plants, and languages for integrated circuit design. He has consulted for Apple, Intel, Sun, Welch-Allyn, Lulu, and many others. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Introduction A few years ago, I was riding on a ski lift with our Swedish exchange student. I asked her if she had thought about what she was going to do after high school. She said that she was considering engineering and had taken a programming class the previous year. I asked her what they taught. She replied, “Java.” I instinctively responded with “That’s too bad.” Why did I say that? Took me a while to figure it out. It’s not that Java is a bad programming language; it’s actually pretty decent. I said it because of the way in which Java (and other languages) are typically used to teach programming today— without teaching anything about computers. If this strikes you as a bit odd, then this book is for you. The Java programming language was invented by James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naughton in the 1990s at Sun Microsystems. It was modeled in part after the C programming language, which was widely used at the time. C doesn’t include automatic management of memory, and memory management errors were a common headache at the time. Java eliminated that class of programming errors by design; it hid the underlying memory management from the programmer. That’s part of what makes it such a good programming language for beginners. But it takes much more than a good programming language to produce good programmers and programs. And it turned out that Java introduced a whole new class of harder-to-debug programming problems, including poor performance resulting from the hidden memory management system. As you’ll see in this book, understanding memory is a key skill for programmers. When you’re learning to program, it’s easy to develop habits that become hard to break. Studies have shown that children who grew up playing at so-called “safe” playgrounds have a higher rate of injuries later in life than those who didn’t, presumably because they didn’t learn that falling hurts. Programming is an analogous situation. Safe programming environments make getting started less scary, but you also need to prepare for the outside world. This book helps you make that transition. Why Good Programming is Important To understand why it’s problematic to teach computer programming without also teaching about computers, first consider how ubiquitous computers have become. The price of computers has fallen so dramatically that using them is now the cheapest way to build many things. For example, using a computer to display an image of an old-fashioned analog clock on a car dashboard costs much less than a mechanical clock. This is a result of how computer chips are manufactured; they’re more or less printed. It’s no longer a big deal to stamp out a chip that contains billions of components. Note that I’m talking about the price of computers themselves, not the price of things that contain computers. In general, a computer chip today costs less than the packaging in which it’s shipped. Computer chips are available that cost pennies. There will likely come a time when it will be difficult to find anything that doesn’t contain a computer. Lots of computers doing lots of things means lots of computer programs. Because computers are so ubiquitous, the field of computer programming is incredibly diverse. As in medicine, many programmers become specialists. You can specialize in areas such as vision, animatio