Member-only story
As a pharmacist learning to be a computer scientist (if you read my article on Walmart’s educational benefits, I am taking advantage of them myself!), I feel like I have a unique opportunity to share the learning process with others. I am a trained learner. Academically I have a doctorate, realistically I am in a rapidly changing profession where hard knowledge is both challenging to find and critical to retain.
However, much of programming is quite new to me, so in that sense I am an utter beginner.
I’m going to write a short article on each of the most important concepts I encounter. I hope that as I apply my general experiences in learning to code I can share it in a way that both correctly highlights what to learn first, then shares in in a way that another beginner can understand — as I have none of the jargon or nuance associated with expertise in the subject material.
To that end, let’s look at a Hello World! code block in C++. Writing a program that outputs “Hello World!” to the user is a common “first challenge” in learning any programming language.
I am going to take an approach I haven’t seen anywhere else in describing code. I am going to go through the code and list the questions I had when I first saw it in class, then explain the answers as best I’ve learned them.
//Hello world program
#include…