Before starting off with the computer programming basics, let us try to understand the basic concepts regarding a computer. No doubt, it is always better to take some computer classes or take up some computer courses, for learning computer programming basics. But this article is meant to give you an introduction to programming. A computer program is nothing but a set of instructions, which when executed give result to a certain operation. These instructions need to be written logically. What I mean to say, is that the instructions should be in a flow, and before writing the program you need to decide the flow of the program. Remember, the computer is a very intelligent machine, but it can do only what you ask it to do. So, the program that you are writing can only work wrong, if there is something wrong in the set of instructions, that you have written in the computer program. The problem with computer programs lies with the manual errors. So one of the most important computer programming basics is, that the set of instructions should be logical.

Before going into further details, let us try to understand the different types of programming languages or rather the different levels of programming languages.

Machine Level Language
Computer works in bits and bytes. It understands the language of the binary digits, 0 and 1. You may write a program in whichever language you want, but it is finally converted into the language of 0s and 1s before it gets executed. Writing a program in machine language is definitely very difficult. It is not possible to memorize a long string of 0s and 1s for every instruction that you want to get executed. It is true that before the higher levels of programming languages were designed, machine languages were used for writing programming codes, but they are no longer used for designing computer programs. Read the rest of this entry »