On December 8, 2013, US President Barack Obama "asked every American to give it a shot to learn to code" (watch it here), kicking off the Hour of Code campaign for Computer Science Education Week 2013. "Learning these skills isn't just important for your future, it's important for our country's future," President Obama said.

The message is clear: coding (aka. programming) is an important skill for this Information Age, and many will agree.  Some might wonder: there are many "how to program" books, why another one? 

A typical how-to-program book will go through the programming concepts, syntax and followed by demonstrations with simple examples. I have read dozens of them (for different programming languages) and taught this way at universities. It was not an effective approach. It is more like a teacher dumping knowledge upon students. There is no better way than writing real programs for real exercises. In this book,  I have chosen the exercises that are very simple to understand, besides teaching values, they are useful and fun to do.