When I started Arendelle I put a special part to one of my first Arendelle programs called 'First Spacings', a part of the program that determines where our sketch will start. Somehow, First Spacings became the first lines of every Arendelle program and evolved to an Arendelle habit and soon a part of Arendelle programmer´s subculture.
First Spacings of other books are usually "For whom this book is written" or "Where to start", "How to read this book". Thus I have to write also some of this for my book!
You are not required to know anything! When I started Arendelle I wanted to design a clean language and simplicity was the most important factor resulting in something simpler than any other language.
Simplicity of Arendelle made it one of the best languages for learning programming principles. Also Arendelle is a language for visual graphics which is an artist's job. So because we are focusing on artist´s as the main Arendelle users, we also want to use Arendelle as a way to attract kids and people with no past programming experience. I write this book to teach programming principles by playing with Arendelle and visual graphics.
So either you're an experienced developer who can code a whole operating system in binary with a pen and some papers without even debugging it once or you're not a developer and you are just curious about how programming works or if you have a cool idea and you want to make it work. All you need to use this book is some love and time.
When it comes to programming books most of us only read one or two paragraphs of only one or two chapters that we need. We (in this case I) read this way because most of the times we know languages and we only need one or two special techniques or codes and it's always easier to find the answer on the internet. If you're one of those people, this book might be not good for you because Arendelle is a language different than others. When you're reading a Java book you always know half of the book because you know C family or when you're reading a Python one, you know all of it because you know Ruby and reading the book is something you don't need.
Most of the programming languages are this way. The act of creating a language is mostly to add features or shaping a language for a specific domain, so they mostly use another language's grammar. That's why in C, C++, C#, Java and ... you use thd same grammar for control, but Arendelle is not like another language. It's grammar, the way it works, it's commands, variable system, etc. Everything in Arendelle is designed from scratch that's why even if you know all programming languages out there, you still can't read Arendelle codes without reading something about it.
That's why I'm asking you to read the "Basics of Arendelle" chapter as well as the "Loop" chapter. Nevertheless, here's good news: There is a "Cheat Sheet" chapter for you at the end of this book you can use as a quick reference.