What Is “Software”?
From a consumer’s point of view, software is a product that you can buy to run on your computer or smartphone. You are not just a consumer anymore, though; you have already written a program, so you are a programmer. In this book, we take the point of view of a programmer. From our point of view, software is a set of instructions to be executed by a computer. A program might have very few instructions in a single file, or it might have millions of instructions spread across thousands of related files.
In another sense, software is any part of a computer’s functionality that is not hardware (that is, the physical components of a computer). Hardware and software are closely related: One isn’t much good without the other. Hardware ...
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