Nikhil Abraham - Coding For Dummies

Nikhil Abraham has worked at Codecademy.com for the last two years. At Codecademy, he helps technology, finance, media, and advertising companies teach their employees how to code. With his help, thousands of marketing, sales, and recruiting professionals have written their first lines of code and built functional applications. In addition to teaching, he manages partnerships and business development for Codecademy, and has helped bring coding to schools in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, France, and the United Kingdom.

Prior to Codecademy, Nikhil worked in a variety of fields, including management consulting, investment banking, and law, and founded a Y-Combinatorbacked technology education startup. He received a JD and MBA from the University of Chicago, and a BA in quantitative economics from Tufts University.

Nikhil lives in Manhattan, New York.

This book is dedicated to Molly Grovak.

This book was possible with help from a number of people.

Thanks to all the people at Wiley, including Steven Hayes, for keeping an open mind to as many ideas as can fit in one phone call, and Christopher Morris for edits and helpful advice. Also, thank you to all the technical editorial, layout, and graphics folks for turning text of variable quality into text of outstanding quality.

Thanks to those of you who helped shape the content in this book and online. For everyone at Codecademy, including Zach and Ryan, thank you for the feedback on the chapters and for answering my questions. Thanks to Douglas Rushkoff, for starting a national conversation on whether we as a society should program or be programmed, and for bringing this message to schools, universities, and non-profits. Thanks to Susan Kish, for being the only executive I can find who has spoken publicly about her journey learning how to code (check out her TED Talk!), and for seeing the future of coding in corporations. Thanks to Alia Shafir and Joshua Slusarz for all the coding sessions you helped organize, leaders you wrangled, rooms you reserved, and laptops you rebooted. Thanks to Melissa Frescholtz and her leadership team for supporting a culture of code, and bringing code education even to places where its used every day. Thanks to alumni at Cornell University, Northwestern University, University of Virginia, and Yale University for testing early versions of content, and helping make it better. Thanks to the people at Donorschoose.org, including Charles Best and Ali Austerlitz, and at Google.org for shining a bright light on coding for women and girls. Thanks to Code.org for making coding accessible and cool for tens of millions of kids in the United States and abroad.

Finally, thanks to Molly, who ordered more take-out, brewed more tea, and cleaned the apartment more times than I can count.

Publishers Acknowledgments

Executive Editor: Steve Hayes

Senior Project Editor: Christopher Morris

Copy Editor: Christopher Morris

Technical Editor: Travis Faas

Editorial Assistant: Claire Johnson

Sr. Editorial Assistant: Cherie Case

Project Coordinator: Melissa Cossell

Cover Image: iStock.com/blackred

Chapter 1

In This Chapter

Seeing what code is and what it can do

Touring your first program using code

Understanding programming languages used to write code

A million dollars isnt cool, you know whats cool? A billion dollars.

Sean Parker, The Social Network

Every week the newspapers report on another technology company that has raised capital or sold for millions of dollars. Sometimes, in the case of companies like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Uber, the amount in the headline is for billions of dollars. These articles may pique your curiosity, and you may want to see how code is used to build the applications that experience these financial outcomes. Alternatively, your interests may lie closer to work. Perhaps you work in an industry in decline, like print media, or in a function that technology is rapidly changing, like marketing. Whether you are thinking about switching to a new career or improving your current career, understanding computer programming or coding can help with your professional development. Finally, your interest may be more personal perhaps you have an idea, a burning desire to create something, a website or an app, to solve a problem you have experienced, and you know reading and writing code is the first step to building your solution. Whatever your motivation, this book will shed light on coding and programmers, and help you think of both not as mysterious and complex but approachable and something you can do yourself.