Introduction to Programming

What is programming and what can it be used for?

KEY TERMS

• computer programming: the process of creating instructions for a computer to execute

• programming language: a computer language used by programmers to communicate with computers

• Python: a programming language often used by data scientists to analyze and display data

Computer programming is the process of using a programming language to create instructions for a computer to execute. Like any other language, a programming language communicates information. While most languages are used to help people communicate with other people, programming languages are used to help people communicate with computers. Just as there are many different languages across the world, there are also several different types of programming languages.

Programming has many applications in the real world — some examples include commanding robots to do physical tasks or developing apps for smartphones. In this textbook, we will be covering one specific application: data science. Data scientists use programming languages to tell computers what they want them to do. For example, a data scientist could use a series of commands to tell a computer to display a graph based on a table of data, or they could tell a computer to look for mathematical patterns in the data. Computers are great at analyzing large amounts of data and can usually do so much faster than humans can; we just need to tell them how to analyze this data. We'll be teaching you all about the how throughout this textbook using Python, a programming language often used by data scientists.