For non-techie individuals, programming languages are totally from another planet. Who cares about the complex patterns and codes of SQL, Java, C++, or Ruby–and the long list goes on? We should. Essentially, programming languages are designed for machines like your computers, mobile phones and tablets to communicate with programs or applications and vise versa. This communication line makes it possible for us to enjoy gaming and internet shiznits we have today.

But learning the syntax is just a fraction of the intricacy, knowing how to build creative solutions out of these programming languages is the real deal, especially for computer science enthusiasts and students alike. In response to the need of a simplified reference, No Starch Press has just released a book entitled “Think Like A Programmer” that hopes to digest concepts to become an edible tool for creative problem solving.

In an interview in line with the book launch, No Starch Press founder Bill Pollock stresses how ideas are placed to essentially aid practitioners and students in putting theories into practice. He said, “Knowing how to write code is very different from knowing how to solve real-world programming challenges. The complaint we hear from students and working programmers is that their training is strong on theory, but weak on practice. Think Like a Programmer promises to help bridge that gap.”

The book authored by computer scientist V. Anton Spraul is divided into 8 chapters that include strategies for problem solving with arrays, pointers and dynamic memory, classes, recursion and code reuse and pure puzzles to solve. It also touches on aggregate statistics, access specifier, encapsulation, dynamic data structures, iterations and more. After browsing through the pages and answering exercises, readers are promised to acquire the following skills: split problems into discrete components to make them easier to solve, make the most of code reuse with functions, classes, and libraries, pick the perfect data structure for a particular job, master more advanced programming tools like recursion and dynamic memory and organize your thoughts and develop strategies to tackle particular types of problems.

Comprehensive trainings in programming offered by the book are quite useful at this day and DevOps era. A tutorial was featured in DevOpsAngle.com in March using R with Hadoop. The three part tutorial tackled local VM, running R and RStudio on EC2 and cloud.

This release is yet another showing of O’Reilly Media’s advocacy to spread knowledge of innovators via books, conferences and online materials. In April, O’Reilly’s Mike Henderson the identified top 11 programming languages. There are millions of programs being created on a yearly basis. As interests loom, being able to crunch the fundamental concepts of programming languages is a good head start.