This book is intended to introduce computing, including programming, to students with no prior programming experience. One of the lessons from the research on computing education is that one doesn't just "learn to program." One learns to program something [4, 17]. How motivating that something is can make the difference between learning to program or not [6]. Some people are interested in learning programming just for programming's sakebut that's not most people.
Unfortunately, most introductory programming books are written as if students have a burning desire to learn to program. They emphasize programming concepts and give little thought to making the problems that are being solved interesting and relevant. They introduce new concepts without showing why the students should want to know about them.
In this book students will learn about programming by writing programs to manipulate media. Students will create and modify images, such as correcting for "red-eye" and generating negative images. Students will modify sounds, like splicing words into sentences or reversing sounds to make interesting effects. Students will write programs to generate Web pages from data in databases, in the same way that CNN.com and Amazon.com do. They will create animations and movies using special effects like the ones seen on television and in movies.
Students in courses taught at Georgia Tech have found these programs interesting and motivating. Students have even reported turning in their programs and then continuing to work on them to see what else they can make.
This book is about teaching people to program in order to communicate. People want to communicate. We are social creatures, and the desire to communicate is one of our primal motivations. Increasingly, the computer is used as a tool for communication even more than as a tool for calculation. Virtually all published text, images, sounds, music, and movies today are prepared using computing technology. This book focuses on how to manipulate images, sounds, text, and movies as professionals might, but with programs written by the students.
We realize that most people will use professional-grade applications to perform these same manipulations. So why learn to program these manipulations yourself? Why not just leave it to the developers of Photoshop and iMovie? The answer depends on your interests and career choices.