Overview

Chapter 1 is short, but very important. If you can successfully master it, and complete its one associated exercise (p. 10) then you will have laid down an excellent foundation for tackling the substantive topics which will follow - and they will follow very quickly indeed! Conversely, if you experience any difficulty with anything in this chapter, this is your opportunity to get your questions answered quickly.

In brief, chapter 1 introduces a problem (the calculation of repayments on a loan) which can be solved "by hand" (i.e. by manual calculation), but which can more conveniently be solved by programming a computer, in a suitable language, "once and for all". The bulk of the chapter is then concerned with presenting and dissecting such a program, written in C.