Programming basics

This manual is aimed at anyone wishing to learn about programming and its concepts. It has been written in such a way as to require only a minimum of prior knowledge, and many of the examples used are taken from everyday life. To enable the reader to apply the concepts taught, we have chosen to use Excel's Visual Basic for Applications language. After reading this book and completing its exercises, the reader should be able to :

• be able to describe the solution to a problem in such a way that it can be easily translated into a programming language;
• know how basic programming tools work and why they're useful;
• have sufficient knowledge to write small applications using Excel's VisualBasic for Applications language;
• be able to learn the syntax of one or more programming languages without having to invest effort in learning programming concepts.