Episode 1: Introduction to programming
Hello dear friend, welcome to this series of very easy tutorials for learning programming in the Java programming language.
What are the prerequisites and skills I need to have to follow these tutorials ?
Does the word Programming scare you ? Have you ever heard rumors saying that programming is difficult, or that in order to be a programmer you have to be a computer science engineer, a PhD in computer science or some sort of genius ? Guess what, that rumors are completely false and maybe they are spread in the sole goal of discouraging people from learning the beautiful art of Programming. Programming is, above all, a pleasure, a game, something fun. All you need to have prior to following these tutorials is a computer, and a little logical thinking. So it’s really not a big deal.
what is programming ?
Imagine that the computer is a person. Then programming is nothing more than telling the computer what to do by giving him a list of orders or instructions that he must execute.
Obviously, if you want the computer to execute your instructions you must provide them in a language that he can understand, so something like:
Please compute the sum of 59 and 41
Is totally incomprehensible gibberish for the computer 
and even the most kind words and polite expressions will not be of any help for him to understand what you want him to do.
There is a thing to know about computers: although they can store a lot of information and do a lot of calculations in less than a second they are still dump and have practically no intelligence: they can’t do anything unless they are told to do it, they have no imagination and can’t learn from their mistakes. That is why you, dear friend, are going to be the master of this beast called a computer, and you are going to use it for your own benefit and take advantage of it’s capabilities.
How can I program ?
Like said before, in order for the computer to understand your commands and instructions, you have to provide them in a language that he knows. The fact is that your computer can’t understand English, Spanish, Chinese or any other human language. These languages are simply too complicated for your computer. In fact, the native language of your computer is called binary language which is based on series of Ones and Zeros looking like the following :
10011100111110110010101…
But this time, it’s us, humans, who consider the above as incomprehensible gibberish :). This is what we call a low-level programming language because it is closer to the machine than to the human.
The good news are that you don’t have to learn low-level programming languages in order to program. Computer scientists have developed for you an easier and more elegant way to talk to your computer. This is what we call high-level programming Languages. These are languages which are close to the human language (English in most cases) and which are simply translated to binary language using programs called Compilers and Interpreters.
Even better, in this series of tutorials we are going to learn one of the most awesome programming languages out there: the Java programming language.
My story with programming languages
When I was in engineering school, they left Java for the end. They started by teaching us Pascal for two weeks pretending that Pascal is a good pedagogical way to introduce us to programming. Then they taught us C for a very long period using it to teach us all the basics of programming. They taught us, in parallel to C, an Assembly language (which is a low-level programming language). They also taught us SQL for databases, Scheme and Lisp for artificial intelligence but kept the most important and demanded programming language for the end. Languages like C#.NET, HTML, CSS, XML, PHP were not taught at all we had to learn them by ourselves. Of course our professors did all of that for our benefit. But I strongly disagree with them on the order of the taught languages. If I had the choice, I would have definitely started with Java, learning all the basics of programming in Java simply because it is a clear, simple, clean, elegant and powerful language.
What can I expect from these tutorials ?
Do expect that your programming level will go up progressively starting from zero. With every tutorial you will learn a new trick and practice it by yourself 
An important property of Java is that it is a C-like or C-based programming language. This means that once you learn Java, learning the other C-like languages will be simply a peace of cake. The C-like family contains languages like C, C++, C#, PHP, Perl and many others which all share a similar syntax.
What is next ?
In the next episode you will be able to write your first Java program (oh yeah !). I do believe that the best way to learn is by doing things yourself in parallel to the theoretical stuff.
See you in next episode.