In these next chapters, you will create many programs that demonstrate useful concepts. These command-line programs are nothing that you’ll show off to your friends, but there should be a small thrill of mastery when you run them. You’re moving from computer user to computer programmer.

Your programs in these chapters will be written in C. Note that these chapters are not intended to cover the C language in detail. Quite the opposite: honed from years of teaching, this is the essential subset of what new-to-programming people need to know about programming and programming in C before learning Objective-C programming.