Introduction

Up until this point, we have been primarily concerned with learning about programming constructs and styles so that we can write programs to manipulate data or solve problems from science, engineering, or mathematics. We have taken for granted that the space in which we do our experimenting, prototyping, and documenting has been the Mathematica notebook, an interface that has some similarities to a word processor document.

It is not uncommon now to add interactive elements to your documents to make them more useful for yourself or the intended reader of your documents. With programs, documentation, and papers all being created and used in electronic format, Mathematica provides a seamless and well-integrated interface to these elements.

Another tool that is useful, especially for educators, are buttons that allow you to hide your program code behind a familiar and easy-to-use interface element – the button. The user clicks on a button and an action happens that is determined by the underlying code.