1.4 Libraries
While many books are now digital and available online, physical libraries are often still present in towns and cities. You can use a library to avoid doing something yourself, namely, buying a book. You can borrow it and read it. If it is a cookbook, you can use the recipes to make food.
A similar idea exists for programming languages and their environments. I can package together reusable data and functions, and then place them in a library. Via download or other sharing, coders can use my library to save themselves time. For example, if I built a library for math, it could contain functions like maximum, minimum, absolute_value, and is_prime. It could also include approximations to special values like π.
Once you have access to a library by installing it on your system, you need to tell your programming environment that you want to take advantage of it. Languages use...
