Intuitive models are self-evident, holistic mental concepts about the world. They are based upon experience in many domains and people are certain and confident to understand them completely. Programmers use them, when they try to understand the semantics of a computer program, explain an algorithmic idea to someone else, check the logical correctness of existing code or create new computer programs. This book focuses on intuitive models (declarative knowledge) applied by programming novices concerning state transitions versus data processing, allocation of activity within a running program, and the assignment of names to entities and function calls.
