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For Dummies is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Used here by license.For funPeople learn skiing, dancing, gardening, scuba diving, and painting because they enjoy the experience. They may never become professionals or experts in their chosen hobbies, but they enjoy fiddling around nevertheless. Similarly, programming a computer can prove fun because you might design a simple program that displays your boss’s ugly face on the computer. More complex programs may make you a million dollars so that you never again need to work for a boss with an ugly face.
To fill a needMany people learn programming with no intention of becoming full-time, professional programmers. They just want a program that solves a particular problem, but they can’t find a program that does it, so they write the program themselves. A man once needed a program to help him file his taxes, for example, but he couldn’t find one, so he taught himself programming and wound up creating TurboTax, one of the most popular tax-preparation programs in the country. Similarly, a freelance writer got frustrated with trying to write a novel with an ordinary word processor, so he created a word processor, specially designed to organize a story, called Z-Write. Z-Write was written by using a program called REALbasic. Whatever your interests, you can write a program to solve a specific problem that others may find useful as well.
For a new or second careerWith computers taking over the world, you’re never unemployed for long if you know how to program a computer. Companies are always looking to create new programs, but you also find a growing market for programmers who can maintain and modify the millions of existing programs that do everything from storing hotel reservations to transferring bank deposits electronically. If you know how to program a computer, you’re in a much better position to earn a lot of money and live wherever you want. You may still want to keep your current job, but programming gives you a new way to expand and share your knowledge. A group of alternative healthcare practitioners, for example, wrote IBIS, a program that provides information for treating a variety of ailments by using acupuncture, massage, diet, and homeopathy. They wrote IBIS by using a program known as Revolution.
As an intellectual challengeMany people find the sheer complexity of computers as fascinating as studying a mathematical puzzle. Not surprisingly, computers tend to attract people of above-average intelligence who enjoy programming a computer to pry into the thought processes of their own minds. To help turn a computer into a thinking tool, one programmer created the Axon Idea Processor by using Prolog, a popular programming language used for researching artificial intelligence. The goal was to create a program to help people manipulate ideas, concepts, and facts so that they can devise a variety of possible solutions while better understanding their own ways of thinking in the process. If using a computer normally seems boring, try writing your own program to help you use your brain more effectively.
As you can see from these four examples, the programming language you use doesn’t matter as much as what you want to make your computer do. The magic of computer programming doesn’t come from using any particular tool, computer, or language. The real magic of programming comes from applying your own imagination and using programming as a means to achieve whatever you want to create.
Although you can make a decent living programming computers, you can also make a decent living selling paper clips, fixing leaky toilets, or raising farm animals. If you aren’t doing what you truly enjoy, all the money in the world isn’t going to make you happy. Choose to learn programming because you want to — not because you think that it’s going to make you rich.
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For Dummies is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Used here by license.