Programming books for newbs June 14, 2007
Most of you are programmers and that means that from time to time you’ll
encounter people who want advice on leaning to program. And, it’s hard to point
them in the right direction because we generally don’t want to spend the time to
teach them ourselves and even if we did most of the learning to program books just plain suck.
So, I’d like to recommend two books. The first is
Learn
to Program by Chris Pine. This is the best intro to programming that I’ve
ever seen. It’s not concerned so much with how to do things in a specific
language as it is with teaching people the basic principles of programming
although it uses Ruby to do so. It’s based on a series of
tutorials
that are still online but have been improved on, and expanded upon greatly
in the book. There’s also
JavaScript:
A Beginner’s Guide by John Pollock which does a surpisingly good job of
teaching basic programming concepts with JavaScript. It’s not that JavaScript
makes this hard, it’s that most of the books get sidetracked on doing html
specific things instead of actually teaching people to program. Yes, the Rhino
book
(JavaScript:
The Definitive Guide ) is undeniably a good JavaScript book but it’s not
good for people who don’t know how to program.
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