By starting this book, you’ve decided to become a programmer. You should know what you’ve signed up for.

The life of a programmer is mostly a never-ending struggle. Solving problems in an always-changing technical landscape means that programmers are always learning new things. In this case, “learning new things” is a euphemism for “battling against our own ignorance.” Even if a programmer is working with a familiar technology, sometimes the software we create is so complex that simply understanding what’s going wrong can often take an entire day.

If you write code, you will struggle. Most professional programmers learn to struggle hour after hour, day after day, without getting (too) frustrated. This is another skill that will serve you well. If you are curious about the life of programmers and modern software projects, I highly recommend the book Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg.

Now it’s time to jump in and write your first program.