Hi. In this video, we're going to look at the most basic parts of a program and introduce the language we're going to be using during this course. Commands are the smallest building blocks of your program. A single instruction to the computer to perform an action. For example, that might be a command to draw something on the screen, to store some data, or even a command that decides which command to run next. A program is a collection of these individual commands put together in the right order to solve a problem, complete a task or, maybe interact with the user. The collection of commands you write for your program is called source code or more normally, just code. Writing a program is the process of entering commands and saving them to a file on the computer. It's important that our commands are exactly correct and that they are in the right order. Unlike a human language, where we can express ourselves and how we feel, programming language's a dumb. We have to be very precise in specifying exactly what we want our code to do. You write your programs in an application called a code editor. Unlike a standard word processor or text editor, a code editor helps you to write code by making suggestions and spotting errors. There are lots of code that is out there, but for this course, we're going to be using the brackets editor. Simon is going to show you how to use brackets in the next video. When we've finished writing our program or more likely written enough to test what we've done so far, we can run it. Sometimes running a program is called executing. If you use Windows, you might know that program's end in.exe. This is short for executable. With the code you will write in this course, executing it is as easy as clicking a button in brackets to launch your web browser. In other programming languages you might have tried, things can be more complicated. A programming language sets the vocabulary for the commands we can use in our programs. When we say we are coding in a specific language, we mean we are instructing the computer with the dictionary of commands the language provides. The computer will interpret these commands and convert them into binary instructions that a specific hardware understands. The language we're going to be using is called JavaScript. JavaScript is very powerful, but relatively easy to learn. Its language that pass the web and is one of the world's most popular. Many websites and applications make extensive use of JavaScript. Such as Google Docs, Hotmail, and Coursera. Along with JavaScript, we'll be making extensive use of a library called p5.js. A library is a collection of code written by someone else that we can use in our programs. By using a library, we avoid something programmers like to call reinventing the wheel. This means we avoid a lot of the boilerplate code to make our programs work. Libraries such as p5.js are a vital part of modern coding and allow us to develop more complicated programs. P5.js is designed for beginners to get into coding and focus on the important parts of that program. It's designed to help make graphical JavaScript applications and animations. Using p5.js is a lot of fun and you can see in a visual way what your code is doing and how programming works. A good place to start learning about p5.js is the project's webpage. Let's take a look at the website now.
