Libraries

Libraries are how we as programmers share important information and work with one another. Learning how to seek out and use libraries is a critical step in growing as an engineer, because it is how we “stand on the shoulders of giants,” making use of the work that others before us have done (saving us the trouble of needing to reinvent that work) and allowing us to spring forth from there. Though odds are students will rarely, if at all, write their own libraries in the context of CS50 AP, it’s quite possible they will seek out and endeavor to incorporate outside libraries into their code. In this brief section we explore libraries and their use and usefulness as a powerful tool of abstraction.