Are you ready to learn how to program a computer? You'll do just that in this book. PROGRAMMING LIKE A PRO FOR TEENS is written in a friendly, unassuming voice that makes it possible for you to master the ideas and concepts that professionals use for programming every day. You learn algorithmic thinking and problem-solving in addition to the C++ language. This book takes a different approach than others that teach programming. It focuses on problem-solving techniques and thought processes and introduces features at your level of complexity. Introductory problem-solving techniques pave the way toward increasingly more advanced techniques. This approach allows you to engage in meaningful programming experiences early in the book, which motivates you to continue. Solutions to end-of-chapter exercises, source code, and other learning materials are included on the companion website.

Hello, world! I like using this greeting for my books about computer programming. It’s tradition in computer programming to introduce a programming language by writing a Hello World program. The program simply outputs the words Hello World. A website is devoted to storing the Hello World programs for programming languages, located at www.roesler-ac.de/wolfram/hello.htm.

There are many programming languages in the world; the aforementioned website boasts that it has more than 400 languages represented as Hello World programs, and that number is rising. An organization called ACM History of Programming Languages (HOPL) hosts conferences and produces journals for anyone interested in studying the history and genealogy of programming languages. This website, found at http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/, has a list of more than 8,000 programming languages! Even more surprisingly, that astounding number of programming languages was developed in a relatively short amount of time. If you assume that the first programming languages were invented in the late 19th century, then on average about 50 languages are being created per year, or around 1 per week!