Comment by jan_m_savage
9 hours ago
This book, while excellent otherwise, is much too harder for beginners, IMO. The pace is too brisk, and it's far from pedagogically useful if you don't already know how to program.
9 hours ago
This book, while excellent otherwise, is much too harder for beginners, IMO. The pace is too brisk, and it's far from pedagogically useful if you don't already know how to program.
Yeah, I don’t think it assumes zero knowledge, which is what I’d expect from a “first programming language” book.
But it does say it’s targeted more for an “algorithms” course in the introduction.
As a side note, I think a REPL is the best environment for learning to program for absolute beginners. You get instant feedback and can focus entirely on just short snippets of real code, without having to worry about compilers, build systems, and “the OS” as a whole. Especially if it comes with a GUI wrapper, you can skip the terminal entirely.
Indeed--so the title is somewhat misleading.
Agree with you wrt to REPL, though sooner or later the programmer-wanna-be has to embrace technical sophistication. :)