How to Think Like a Programmer: Problem Solving for the Bewildered

by Paul Vickers

How to Think Like a Programmer is a bright, accessible, fun read describing the mindset and mental methods of programmers. Anticipating the problems that students have through the character of Brian... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1408065827
• ISBN13: 9781408065822
• Release Date: February 2008
• Publisher: Cengage Learning
• Length: 288 Pages

Customer Reviews

aspects of being a programmer

Programming is not for everyone. Yet Vickers explains that it can be tackled in a systematic fashion. He covers various aspects of what it means to be a programmer. At the deepest level, you need to be able to think in terms of algorithms. And don't let that word scare you. This has several parts. One of which is to be able to decompose a problem into smaller parts, until each can be tackled adequately. Then you have to stitch all these together into a coherent program. Another aspect is rigour. Unlike some qualitative and subjective fields, like art, you must think precisely. As precisely as possible. To some extent, the ability to decompose a problem into subproblems lets you do some handwaving. But programming is characterised by you eventually having to sit down and code some solution exactly. En route, the book discusses the use of pseudocode. As formal or informal as your requirements and experience dictate. One need is to be able to write such pseudocode as the first step in doing a problem. The next is to then manually translate that into actual compilable source code.