why should you learn to write programswriting programs (or programmingis very creative and rewarding activity you can write programs for many reasonsranging from making your living to solving difficult data analysis problem to having fun to helping someone else solve problem this book assumes that everyone needs to know how to programand that once you know how to program you will figure out what you want to do with your newfound skills we are surrounded in our daily lives with computers ranging from laptops to cell phones we can think of these computers as our "personal assistantswho can take care of many things on our behalf the hardware in our current-day computers is essentially built to continuously ask us the question"what would you like me to do next?what nextwhat nextwhat nextwhat nextwhat nextwhat nextfigure personal digital assistant programmers add an operating system and set of applications to the hardware and we end up with personal digital assistant that is quite helpful and capable of helping us do many different things our computers are fast and have vast amounts of memory and could be very helpful to us if we only knew the language to speak to explain to the computer what we would like it to "do nextif we knew this languagewe could tell the computer to do tasks on our behalf that were repetitive interestinglythe kinds of things computers can do best are often the kinds of things that we humans find boring and mind-numbing