What books or resources do you know of for teaching programming from the most basic beginning? While publishers like O'Reilly have a book for pretty much every occasion, these are all for a fairly sophisticated audience and there seems to be a fairly serious gap between what's required to understand those books and what an absolute beginner knows, especially someone who's not that old.
Books like Hello Ruby look like an effort to bridge that gap, it's a very gentle introduction to the subject. Are there any that go further? Are there books like this that can take someone all the way to writing actual, useful code?
The Girls Who Code series seems more focused on making programming itself seem fun, worthwhile, and engaging, which is absolutely a great thing to see as there's a lot of misunderstanding and bias here worth addressing, but these books don't actually commit to teaching programming per-se, just preparing people for the idea that they can program.
The classic Poignant Guide to Ruby certainly aims to do just that, combining whimsy and practical lessons, but I'm concerned that it's a bit too quirky to be a good general approach. It's like an amazing art project that just so happens to teach a bit of Ruby in the process.
Have you got any favourites for someone who's aspiring to program but has zero knowledge of how to go about doing that?
Top comments (5)
So I'm going to shamelessly promote here: The Super Simple Programming Book: amazon.com/dp/1718198450. It's a quick read, and it teaches basic programming concepts in a straightforward and friendly way. The goal is to teach programming concepts without overwhelming students with too many details. It's a primer to programming, using Python.
I can't think if a better fundamentals-first introduction to the craft than How To Design Programs. It doesn't use a mainstream language but that doesn't matter, its method of using gradually more complex mini-Schemes to introduce concepts sets you up to transfer to any more domain specific tool afterwards.
Not a book but freecodecamp.com it's amazing
I agree. It teaches JS with 6 courses and 30 projects, small practices, if you stuck it provides solution. So you can self-taught. High quality and costs no money only time and sweat.
It's the most stared repo in Github.
Grokking Algorithms by Aditya Bhargava is a pretty good beginner's book.