MikroNot!

Not!

When you look at the “programming” book shelves in any random book store, you will see loads of books that promise to turn you into a programmer in 21 days or faster. Some boast that you don’t need to know anything. Once you have worked through the first part of this book, however, you know that neither of these approaches can create a solid understanding of programming.

Acquiring the mechanical skills of programming—learning how to write instructions or expressions that the computer understands, getting to know what functions are available in the libraries, and similar activities—aren’t helping you much with real programming. To make such claims is like saying that a 10-year old who knows how to dribble can play on a professional soccer (football) team. It is also like claiming that memorizing a thousand words from the dictionary and a few rules from a grammar book teaches you a foreign language.

Proper programming is far more than the mechanics of acquiring a language. It is about reading problem statements and extracting the important concepts. It is about figuring out what is really wanted. It is about exploring examples to strengthen your intuitive understanding of the problem. It is about organizing knowledge, and it is about knowing what you don’t know yet. It is about filling those last few gaps. It is about making sure that you know how and why your code works, and it means conveying this knowledge to all future readers of your code. In short, proper programming is about solving problems systematically and conveying the ideas within the code.

The rest of this book is all about these things; very little of the book’s content is about the mechanics of DrRacket, BSL or libraries. The book shows you how good computer programmers think about problems. And promised, you will even learn to see that this way of solving problems applies to other situations in life, e.g., the work of doctors and journalists, lawyers and engineers, or car mechanics and photographers.

Oh, and by the way, the rest of the book uses a tone that is more appropriate for a serious text than this prologue. Enjoy!