Beginning Programming For Dummies

kill the monster, the game lets you keep playing. If the monster kills and eats you, the game displays the words GAME OVER on-screen.

A program like Microsoft Windows may appear to have nothing in common with a video game like World of Warcraft. However, no matter how diverse their purposes may be, every program consists of nothing more than instructions (lines of code) that tell the computer what to do, step by step.

The programming language you learn and use is less important than the ideas you have and the programs you create.

Every program uses sequencing, branching, and looping instructions.

A problem that keeps a program from working correctly is known as a bug.

Decompiling effectively allows you to steal the ideas of others, but it’s often used to dissect computer viruses and worms to understand how they work (and how to defend against them).

You can actually decompile any program, including programs that you compile into machine language. But unlike with decompiling p-code programs, decompiling a machine-language version of a program never gets you the original high-level language source code that the programmer used to write the program

So if you write a program in Java and compile it into p-code, a rival can decompile your p-code program and see your original Java source code. Your rival then ends up with a nearly identical copy of your source code, which gives him the opportunity to steal your program.

Best of all, programs that you compile into p-code can run without the original source code, which means that you can protect your source code and still give your program away to others

Whereas a compiler stores machine code in a separate file, an interpreter converts source code into machine language but stores the machine code in the computer’s memory